I mean despite it's history the snark is well deserved. With so many companies and people in the bay paying taxes, where the hell does all the money go?
Interesting, tidbit you added here. But snark is needed for this situation.
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Interesting, tidbit you added here. But snark is needed for this situation.
If anything the Bay Area has utterly failed to provide systems software of lasting value to address public needs like these.
They have very little money left for paying engineering and construction staff.
I'm not trying to be snarky, it's just that for regular citizens who don't have time to attend BART BoD and committee meetings it's almost impossible to tell whether existing money is being wisely spent. So people get the impression that taxes are going up while service quality declines and assume the money must be going into someone's pocket.
The dominant position (even in CA) has been no or little subsidy.
https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/BART_FY24%2...
I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area CA, Portland OR, and Philadelphia PA over the last 10 years. All of those metros have comparable public transit payment systems with auto-loading special use cards and are at various stages of adopting support for tap to pay. Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.
Internationally I think there is a larger range of experiences. I don't travel enough to properly gauge it, but I was in Paris in the last year and I don't think public transit payment was better. Still had to acquire specialized fare cards and navigate different payment systems between RATP and RER. Honestly, SF Bay comes out slightly ahead of Paris if only because Clipper is unified between various transit options (BART, Bus, Ferry, CalTrain) IMO.
That doesn't change anything in the comment you're replying to. Just because it's above average for the USA, does not mean it isn't also ancient by global standards.
Chicago is pretty good too. IIRC they also have tap-to-pay. In fact, I think they had it before NYC
Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Dubai, Japan, UK. The USA is supposed to be among the top in terms of technology but infra is just garbage. The BART is pathetic. I don't know why you defend it with pride. Attack it, because if you hate it and you are vocal about it, things are more likely to change.
I'm sick of people defending something that's shit because of pride. It's garbage.
I can still use an auto-loading special use card if I want. I do that so I can have a free transfer between different transit systems during my commute.
- Prior to the pandemic, BART got >60% of its operating costs from riders (p9 in your linked doc)
- Ridership is still way down relative to 2019 even though costs are up in absolute terms
- Even from 2020 data, BART was hitting 50% https://lovetransit.substack.com/p/most-profitable-public-tr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...
The subsidy in BART is higher than anyone would like it now, but I do think that's still a transient response to the pandemic; either more people will have to eventually go back to riding public transit, or we'll need to drop the emergency funding it's been receiving.
Public transit is widely touted as being more efficient than the alternatives, but for most trips it's cheaper (factoring in maintenance, depreciation, gas, etc, and pretending that BART is as convenient and reliable) to drive than to take BART, and not by a little bit.
Income just from gas taxes, tolls, and registration cover ~half the infrastructure maintenance, so there exists effectively another $200-$300 per capita per annum subsidy, but that's nowhere near enough to make BART cost less than just driving, even if I had to account those extra fees against my driving.
Why is that? How is BART worse than driving and still losing money when it's supposedly a more efficient solution? Is it just low volume? Is the organization making bad bets? Is the premise that trains are more efficient flawed?
BART does now accept credit cards at the turnstiles now (I think this started 2 years ago). Agreed that it took a long while to get there, much much longer than in other places.
Personally I prefer the Clipper method, as it's generally faster to scan than a contactless credit card payment (that's going to always be the case for closed-loop payment system). I also like that BART (and Muni, Caltrain, etc.) will pay less to Visa/Mastercard/whomever in transaction fees if I use my Clipper card and periodically top it up (which, as I have my Clipper card on my phone, happens automatically if the balance ever falls below $10). Credit card tap-to-pay is a nice convenience for out-of-town visitors and for locals who rarely use transit and don't have Clipper (or who use a physical Clipper card but forgot it at home), but I don't think it's a great way to pay for transit day-to-day.
It also looks like public transportation is mostly paid for with sales taxes, federal loans/grants, and $1 billion of taxes on diesel fuel.
1. See chart A on page 24, and chart F on page 28: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/budgets/docume...
Transit in the bay area fails at pretty much all of those things. Service is just infrequent enough to make things difficult, and unreliable enough that you worry that a late or missing bus or train will make you late. Cleanliness is inconsistent, and there are often people on drugs riding around all day, spouting nonsense. We do have some subways, but not enough of them, and there is no light rail line in SF that runs only underground, so they can only be a maximum of two cars long (otherwise they'd be too long for a single city block in some areas). All of the above-ground light rail is at mercy of car traffic (with tracks in some areas actually running in the same lanes as cars), stop signs, and traffic lights (which do not prioritize the trains). We do have some dedicated bus lanes, but they're dedicated bus+taxi lanes, and Ubers/Lyfts and regular passenger cars abuse them with little risk of being ticketed.
The end result of this is that people see that it takes 10 minutes to drive and 40 minutes to take public transit, but that they really need to add on an extra 15 minutes to the transit trip to account for delays and unreliability. So even though they don't want to to deal with parking, or pay 5-10x as much for an Uber/Lyft fare, they value their transit time more, and drive or get a car ride from an app.
Earlier this year, SF Muni was experiencing a large budget shortfall. They managed to save many jobs from being cut, which is commendable, but instead they reduced service. This just causes more people to look at the situation and choose to find an alternative that will get them where they're going faster, and more reliably.
It’s like saying crime is a problem in this world because of your lack of engagement in stopping crime.
Bitching on HN is one small form of engagement I can afford and I’m hoping at least one bart official sees it and realize what a shit job he’s doing or one government official sees it and realizes what a shit government official he is and changes something. Minuscule hope but why not.
Instead we get random people who will only benefit from fixing the bart actually trying to defend it as if it’s their favorite sports team.
I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were
first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.
I was in Paris in the last year and I don't think public transit
payment was better.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=train+o...
Instead, we could have an interesting discussion, maybe even one involving technology, that nerds would enjoy!
You don't have to be an activist wherever you go. In fact, it's almost alway inappropriate soap boxing/virtue signaling.
I once looked at how long to get to work by public transit (~20 miles each way) - it was estimated at 1.5 hours each way (multiple buses + some walking), and costing ~$12-15 each way (15+ years ago). It took 25 minutes each way to drive on a good day, 45 each way on a bad day. Worst case was ~60 minutes to get home.
On average, it would take 2+ hours less PER DAY to drive, and cost $5-10 less, calculating driving cost at $0.50/mile. Plus I could go on my own schedule, no walking in the rain, etc. There was very little "win" for public transit in any way.
Does Caltrain still count entering the BART station at Milbrae as not tapping off? That was always my favorite quirk of the Clipper system.
(For those not familiar... Caltrain is a tap on / tap off "proof of payment" system. You're charged the full fare when you tap on, and refunded what you didn't use when you tap off. BART and Caltrain share a platform at Milbrae. You can get off Caltrain and be right at the gate to get into BART by tapping your Clipper card. Well. This taps you into BART, but doesn't tap you off of Caltrain. To get your refund, you had to know this was a thing and go find a fare validator before tapping on to BART. You also end up being inside Caltrain's proof of payment required area without proof of payment while you walk along the platform from Caltrain's fare validator to BART's entry turnstile. I am probably the only person to ever care about this, but...)
Venting is different from expressing your negative emotions healthily. E.g. telling your significant other you are frustrated because of a problem at work is healthy. Venting about the problem, complaining, being sarcastic etc is known to reinforce anger and generally lead to unhealthy outcomes.
Think in terms of evolution. If snark didn't convey any survival benefit, why tf does it exist?
I'm not complaining to a void. All the readers of HN have heard me and other people complaining hear will be heard too. In aggregate many people complaining on many different venues creates an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.
Cancel culture on social media has made big changes to this country and not everything necessarily good. But one thing is clear, it makes change effectively. Why not use it for the right thing?
Either way, I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece. Bart IS categorically fucking garbage, that's less of a complaint and more of a statement. I'm just stating facts.
I can't comprehend the thought that polluting this not-bay-area specific forum with complaints will somehow eventually, hopefully, make its way to a politician.
> because I need some platform to say my piece.
This is soap boxing. To affect change, it would be better to do something directly in the real world, rather than hoping for the snark to overflow and leak out of here into the real world.
https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/contactless-payments....
When I moved to the bay area, I thought it was so rad I could use the clipper card for vta + bart + caltrain + muni + ferry all in one.
Dude, fuck off. The full quote which you've taken out of context is this: "I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece."
I hate it when people twist statements. I literally said I am not doing that. I am just stating the god awful truth which is: Bart is total shit. But here's another truth: When you manipulate my statement and take it out of context it makes you a shit head too.
Does Caltrain still count entering the BART station at Milbrae as not tapping off?
Shame is like other kinds of abusive and toxic behavior. Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse? Evolution can be a useful guide, but it takes work and research to establish an evolutionary cause of a behavior.
One thing that's made a huge impact on our society is that many people participating in cancel culture and promoting shame and anger as solutions also tell people not to vote.
I watched it happen three times before the last three presidential elections and it was a big part of the voter suppression messaging tracked by democracy watchdogs. I'd argue that the biggest impact cancel culture has had is electing Donald Trump twice, weakening faith in democracy, and increasing the appeal of authoritarianism.
Shame, anger, and other tactics of using abuse to promote change is simply not effective. That's beyond the fact that it's unethical.
Cancel culture is appealing because hate and anger are addictive and they make you feel powerful. But they also make it hard to feel empathy. This is basically the main point of Star Wars, beyond just wanting to make a swashbuckler film set in space.
If an attribute of humanity is universal and historically prevalent it becomes for sure through induction that the attribute survived the gauntlet of natural selection. There is a huge survival benefit here.
All of evolutionary psychology can only be formulated through induction as there’s no way to find causal evidence for psychological attributes short of time travel.
> Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse?
We don’t know if it does. But abuse is possibly not evolutionary and possibly not beneficial. The reason is because it’s not universal across societies. Not like Shame.
Though there is evidence that it is beneficial. Hitting children in Asia is normal. The high achievement and IQ and work ethic of those in China are often achieved through physical abuse not to the extent where it injures the child extremely but to the extent where pain changes behavior. A large part of the economic success of the Chinese is due to high industriousness of the society which is very much influenced by physical abuse of children.
Additionally, the overwhelming majority of human societies have men as the dominant sex and often hitting a wife is equivalent to spanking a child in societies where men have power. Was this beneficial? Who knows. One thing is that in societies where men dominate women rate their lives as happier and the divorce rate is significantly down. While the data on this isn’t fully solid this isn’t strictly evidence it’s food for a thought. It’s also the overwhelming dominant paradigm of humanity where men dominate women. Modern society as we know it where women are equal to men is experimental we’ve never done it and there’s no way of knowing if natural selection will select for this.
Another thing to note is that modern societies are all experience population decline. There is enough of a correlation here that we believe modernity is causal to population decline. What part of modernity? We don’t know. Likely it is very complicated but male domination could be an aspect of it. Take India. Spousal abuse is much more common and men hold a dominant place in the family unit and they also follow more traditional arranged marriages. Indias population is not declining, it is growing and it is quite possible spousal abuse or the attributes that lead to spousal abuse are causal.
We don’t know. So my long winded explanation here is that you cannot use abuse as an example of evidence against the evolutionary benefits of shame. It doesn’t follow from the logic or the evidence and you only said it as if it was like dropping the mic because you’re heavily influenced by modern culture. Abuse = universally bad to you but from an impartial and objective standpoint it is not.
Also in a separate window ask it for specific examples of how anger and hate has changed society for the better.
Tons of examples.
ChatGPT will give you correct answers on most of these topics, but you have to walk it through the actual research first and then ask the question. That is, you have to load in the academic context rather than the political context.
This falls into the category of things like religion where the LLMs won't tell you the truth with a simple prompt like that because that would make too many of its users angry. They're aligned not to say anything negative about religious leaders. Similarly, they're aligned not to say anything negative about even terrorist groups if they have a lot of vocal defenders.
There’s tons of examples of hatred, anger and cancel culture doing good for the world and making the world a better place.
Maybe ask it for examples of how snark has impacted the world in a positive way.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68bcde6c-5960-8001-93ce-63a026a7c6...
Point is the world doesn’t work in the same idealist way that you think.
At any rate I see your point. People have used snarkiness in the past and it does drive engagement, which is what I said above.
The disconnect is that that engagement has not improved society in any way. It feeds the anger junky and helps them feel smug and righteous. But it doesn't drive change.
Nothing personal, but I find this conversation dreadfully tedious. I've had it almost word for word with probably dozens of people with anger issues now. Every one of them feels their anger is righteous and good. The few I've known well spiralled into increasingly unhappy lives as their anger became the only way they could socialize.
Anger prevents you from thinking clearly. That's why people who crave power like to make others angry. It's also why you should be deeply skeptical of anyone promoting anger or hate as a solution to anything.
> The multi-stage turnstiles at the RER stations… ugh.
Ah yes, had one of many, "I look like the tourist I am," moments navigating those visiting the Versailles.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/1awweix/trimet_ex...
But, your whole thing still fits the definition of soapboxing.
> To "soapbox" means to deliver a passionate or self-important public speech or express one's strong opinions, often on a topic one feels strongly about, originating from the literal practice of standing on an empty soapbox as an improvised platform to address a crowd. The term is frequently used figuratively to describe speaking forcefully or at length about a personal issue or belief.