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A computer upgrade shut down BART

(www.bart.gov)
232 points ksajadi | 6 comments | 05 Sep 25 14:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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Buuntu ◴[05 Sep 25 17:18 UTC] No.45141006[source]▶
Everyone here blaming BART and bureaucracy for being inefficient when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting (and zoning preventing housing/badly needed ridership near transit stops). Yes it's expensive to build transit just like it's expensive to build anything in America, which we should fix but that is not unique to BART.

It's quite possible the system will collapse next year if we don't pass increased taxes to fund it in 2026 https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis.

Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....

Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.

So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.

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dilyevsky ◴[05 Sep 25 17:32 UTC] No.45141205[source]▶
Hilarious that from 2020 and to this day ridership has collapsed but BART operating expenses went up despite that and all the efficiencies they talk about in your link. Kind of tells you everything you need to know about where the money is actually going...

Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.

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Buuntu ◴[05 Sep 25 17:49 UTC] No.45141434[source]▶
That is mostly a zoning issue, have you seen the density around Tube stations? Compare that to the density around half of the BART stations which are big parking lots surrounded by single family houses. Of course it's cheaper to run a transit system in a city with twice the population density and population in the metro area.

Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data/

BART is one of the most cost efficient systems in the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1d27dvo/us_cost_pe.... It's so efficient that pre-pandemic it got the majority of its funding through fares, not taxes.

By the way it costs exorbitant amounts to build highways too and you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you.

So quite frankly you don't know what you're talking about.

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1. dilyevsky ◴[05 Sep 25 18:03 UTC] No.45141599[source]▶
BART service area population is comparable to Greater London

> Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data

If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km

> you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you

uhm what?

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2. Buuntu ◴[05 Sep 25 18:13 UTC] No.45141733[source]▶
BART is not a typical metro system in that it serves a lot of suburbs that have very little population density, and was mainly built as a commuter service to get people to downtown SF. So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has without massive upzoning and more infill stations. Comparing it to the Tube which mostly serves the city of London is not an apples to apples comparison. Look at the costs of building new rail infrastructure in London and it's comparable to here.

> If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km

What you're talking about in that link is the extension to San Jose, not day to day BART operations. That one does deserve criticism as they've made poor decisions like not doing cut/cover because NIMBYs in San Jose don't want any disruption to streets. So instead we are tunneling to the Earth first. Elsewhere in the world municipalities understand that it's worth temporary disruptions to roads to bring down costs, but of course America is unique and we have to learn these lessons ourselves.

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3. inferiorhuman ◴[05 Sep 25 18:23 UTC] No.45141866[source]▶

  So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has
  without massive upzoning and more infill stations.
Yet BART insists on expanding its footprint instead of building infill stations.
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4. dilyevsky ◴[05 Sep 25 18:31 UTC] No.45141964[source]▶
I'm not sure why we've drifted talking about new lines/stations. Both Tube and BART hardly built anything in the last 10 years. I was only remarking on operating costs for what was already built by pandemic and the fact that ridership seems completely untangled from it.

It seems to me that BART management did what most of other government bureaucracies did around here during covid - threw their feet on the desk and took an extended 2+ year sabbatical

5. jandrese ◴[05 Sep 25 19:31 UTC] No.45142661{3}[source]▶
The infill stations don't make much sense because they're also low density housing. The fundamental problem with mass transit in CA is the insane insistence to remain low density despite the overwhelming demand for housing. It's the sin that leads to all of the problems the state faces.
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6. inferiorhuman ◴[05 Sep 25 19:50 UTC] No.45142859{4}[source]▶
No, treating BART as a low-density transit system while granting them right of ways in some of the most dense areas of the country doesn't make much sense. 30th & Mission and 98th & San Leandro would've absolutely made sense while neither Millbrae nor SFO should've ever been built.