I don't know the last time the entire BART system got shut down. There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages.
No information as to the actual cause right now. Easy to speculate that it's a cyberattack, but I'm going to go for the free square and wildly guess it is a DNS issue.
Best wishes and godspeed to the folks who are working on fixing the issue, whatever it is.
We changed the URL from https://www.bart.gov/ to an article that provides more information about what happened. See also:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bart-shut-down-t... (https://archive.ph/LnvJ1)
https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/09/bart-service-shuts-down-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/bart-train-shutdown.ht... (https://web.archive.org/web/20250509152319/https://www.nytim...)
https://abc7news.com/post/systemwide-bart-shutdown-due-train...
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I used to live in Oakland, and am really sad to see continued failures of BART. They had started significant expansions right before the pandemic, allowing a long (but no traffic) ride possible from Oakland to San Jose. A key challenge for BART is that they depend a lot more on ticket sales than subsidies, and as a result, have been hit much harder with lower ridership.
As an occasional BART rider, the changes they've made since the pandemic have been in the right direction. I'm mostly indifferent to the new trains and payment cards, but they've increased the frequency so that missing a train doesn't mean you can be waiting for over 30 minutes, which can be longer than your entire trip.
The main problem which BART cannot fix is that the trains usually don't go to where you want to go.
BART can fix that by building dense mixed use -- office, commercial, and residential -- around their stops.
They are doing that in East Bay [1] on BART owned land. They had been blocked so far by the most virulent NIMBY trash leading to some of the most scathing coverage [2]. Most have been unblocked and are under construction. The one still being blocked is Ashby BART because of (say it with me folks), a "HIsToriC flEa MARkeT" (that mostly sells stolen goods)[3].
[1]: https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/magazine/housing-berkeley...
[3]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/09/17/berkeley-ashby-bart-...
> What’s the real reason
My links are worth clicking:
http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea.html
https://goldenstatswarrior.substack.com/p/the-great-migratio...
BART can't do that. The cities can do that.
Lol. That sounds like you’re saying “well the neighborhood sure is shit but at least we’ve got good public transit”.
> They had started significant expansions right before the pandemic, allowing a long (but no traffic) ride possible from Oakland to San Jose.
They're still working on this, with four more stations planned beyond Berryessa (Little Portugal, Downtown San José, Diridon, and Santa Clara), plus an additional infill station on the Berryessa line. I think that would be really cool. Unfortunately it looks like this new extension won't be that competitive with Caltrain as a way to get to San Jose from San Francisco. Maybe at non-express times.
Also, it looks like it won't be complete until 2040!?
Otherwise known as the Worst Transit Project in the US [1]
i mean yeah if you’re in SF caltrain is super convenient, so its fine. Getting from oakland to south bay without a car was hell though. This line would make it so much better.
Plus: Oakland is actually building homes for people while SF remains laughably behind on building quotas.
Try the transbay bus. Depending on station location, it’s often faster than the bart. Also, it doesn’t smell like piss, and I’ve never witnessed an assault on it.
Amtrak still has service on that corridor. Apparently it was a convenient way to get to SF back in the day (via ferry).
Of course most of Silicon Valley is closer to the San Francisco - Santa Cruz line, making the ferry service redundant.
It’s too bad they ripped all this stuff out, and will never rebuild it!
> sad to see continued failures of BART
I think this is overstated, at least from an operations point of view. My mom has been using BART to commute to work for over a year and I can't recall many incidents like this.
ever since I paid $8 for jumping in and out of a BART station b/c I meant to go into a Muni station... I lost all respect for them.
This is pretty common among transit agencies, I got on the wrong platform in Japan once and couldn't get back out until I talked to a station agent, the fare gate gave an error and wouldn't open the gates. Not sure if that's better or worse behavior than charging a fare.
It's called an "excursion fare", which is meant for those that just ride the train without getting off and come back to the same station. You can talk to a BART station agent (assuming you can find one) and they'll let you out, or call customer service and they'll reverse the charge.
Modern fare systems should be able to figure out when you've exited right after entering and not charge you. BART is supposed to be adding a 30 minute grace period so if you go in and out of the station within 30 minutes, you won't be charged.
Heh, I was in Japan a few weeks ago, and had left my bag in a locker at a station (inside the fare gates). I went back to get it later in the day (when I could check into my hotel), and the station attendant charged me 150 yen just to go in to get it and come right back out!
I get that they want to charge people who ride the trains for... fun?... and then get off at the same station, but it felt really silly.
I think those tickets are for people who train watch on the platform or see off friends/family from the platform.
If it was good enough in 1980, Japan might computerise it but they won't change it.
Fun fact: the reason it's like that is because both levels were envisioned for BART usage before the Peninsula lines got cut. In the original design both levels would have been the same fare area and you would have been able to walk between them instead of having to take the big escalators down to BART caged off from the Muni level. It's comical to watch one of the Muni trains crawl to one end of the giant platform that was sized for 10-car BART trains.
Ah, I've always wondered why the Muni platforms (especially Powell) are so ridiculously long compared to the Muni trains themselves. Makes so much sense that they were originally designed for BART cars.
And here's a citation — Engineering Report: Rapid Transit for the San Francisco Bay Area, June, 1961: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50-years/1961-...
“The San Francisco Downtown element of the Bay Area regional rapid transit system consists of a four-track, two-level subway beneath Market Street and a two-track, single-level subway beneath Post Street.”
“At Montgomery Street, the Market Street subway joins the San Francisco approach to the Trans-Bay Tube. The subway extends up Market Street to about Van Ness Avenue where it swings lo the south to become the Peninsula Line in Mission Street. The lower level of the subway provides through regional service by joining the Peninsula and the Trans-Bay Lines. The upper level is built to accommodate local rapid transit trains at a future time and will be utilized initially by the streetcars of the San Francisco Municipal Railway.” (emphasis mine)
And the flow map of estimated 1975 passenger counts makes it clear why they would want to double up on platform capacity along that stretch: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50-years/1961-...
Imagine if we got this BART: https://i.imgur.com/hon9nEf.jpeg (1956)
I too learned that the hard way when dropping a family member off. I naively assumed it wouldn't charge me if I tapped out at the same station 10 minutes later.
London Underground has nice clear policies around this, both about what you'll be charged
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
And about refunds (typically you'd get an automatic refund for a one-off event)
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/touched-in...
I always have high levels of respect for companies with such clarity
In The Netherlands you get a full refund if you tap out at the same station within 20 minutes. If you travel with NS (National Railways), you even have 60 minutes to tap out.
Having someone pay just to wave off someone is incredibly customer-hostile. Besides, how many people are even committing fraud like that?
A parallel comment suggests it might be an “excursion fair.” Although it is not really the intended use of a train, some reasons an individual might ride the train might be sight-seeing, or because they are homeless and want somewhere warm to hang out. In that case, IMO it isn’t really a fraud attempt to get off on the same stop you got in, it is just unexpected use of the system.
Did they ever fix this as announced in 2022? https://sfist.com/2022/12/08/rejoice-bart-is-dumping-the-6-4...
Oh! I thought they were going to get rid of that fee: https://sfist.com/2022/12/08/rejoice-bart-is-dumping-the-6-4...
You can talk with the clerk to get a refund. But I thought they were doing away with it entirely…
You can also call them and get it refunded after the fact
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I don't see how it ever comes back. You used to have business people and engineers riding the train. But with Covid the enforcement policies got really bad and the trains and atmosphere are so trashy now. It's far easier for the aforementioned group to just hire an Uber than deal with the crime and trashiness that's plaguing the system now.
I ride the system all the time and I don't think it's trashy. Also there are the new gates all over that block people from jumping in as easily and that has been cut down quite a bit. I think it's tough for Bart to probably come back still because people don't need to be in downtown SF as much as they used to because a lot of people work from home now, but yeah I just don't think it's fair to say that the system is some trashy system. I think it's mostly pretty nice.
Good to hear.
I heard they reopened the bathrooms (they closed them system wide in response to 9/11). If true, I’m guessing that helps a lot.
BART is unfortunately doomed. It had been running on federal aid, and with a deficit. Ridership is down 60% from 2019 (50 million vs 118 million). Now with San Francisco and Oakland in a long, slow downturn, it is unlikely to improve.
Have you ever read what people said about NYC in the 1970s ?
BART's doing great. good headways, same schedule all day everyday. name another american transit agency doing a takt
It’s not frequent though.
I'd say the BART administrators overpaying themselves is the bigger moneysink. Not to mention the spending 73M dollars to overhaul the gates to stop fare evaders, when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
The problem is that the Bay Area needs a single transit agency. All the agencies fighting each other for funding doesn’t help. It’s a much easier task to levy a minuscule tax on the entire region that pays for free public transit. If BART wants to do that at the moment, they can’t.
I live in an area with a county-wide transit sales tax, and it just seems to result in them running a lot of empty buses around and building (and eventually abandoning) transit centres. Full price is $1.50 (which if paying cash means fiddling around with coins) except for the 50+ mile express routes which are $2.50.
Well you could be in the Bay Area where you’d have 27 agencies, that still run a lot of empty routes and build useless and expensive transit centers, and then charge way more than what you have.
They also need to get the roads, busses and ferries on board with this plan.
The goal (by law) should be twofold:
1) increase the number of people with a 90th percentile commute under 15, 30 and 60 minutes. (i.e., improve quality of life and encourage economic growth)
2) sharply reduce the average CO2-equivalent emissions of each commuter.
The current statewide policy (by law) is to reduce commute miles.
In practice, this means intentionally sabotaging commute corridors, which slows economic growth (fewer available workers and fewer reachable jobs) reduces quality of life and increases CO2 emissions (due to repeated idling and hard acceleration).
The MTC is that organization for the Bay Area.
MTC is not just concerned with allocating state funds, though. They administer RM2 and RM3 and the AB1107 sales tax, and they put on a trench coat to act at BATA collecting and using bridge tolls.
> when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
There was a study done on this. It turns out that the median income of someone riding under the Bay Bridge in BART is higher than someone driving a car across it.
In other words the wealthier people are using BART. So if you made it free, you'd be subsidizing the wealthy.
That’s a very wrong conclusion to draw from the study. If median income of someone riding the bart is higher than someone driving, it could also mean that they drive because it is cheaper to do so. If you make it free, they would probably ride BART too, making it more accessible and equitable.
That makes perfect sense. Poor people are attracted to cheaper real estate (residential and commercially). Real estate is cheaper because it is less accessible and convenient.
One area is concentrated and the other is decentralized.
So, force the rich people to use the bridge, and increase commute times for everyone?
Seems like a much better plan than synchronizing and expanding the train networks so they cover more neighborhoods in all parts of the bay (except Marin, of course…)
Please forgive me for the ignorance, but is there some significance of “under the bay bridge” for this study, or did they just pick it arbitrarily? It seems like picking a point arbitrarily like that could introduce some skews.
I'm pretty sure it's just being used as a turn of phrase here. Under the bridge means commuters are riding BART, over the bridge means they're driving.
> when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
Absolutely not.
I think there should be options for low income residents to ride for free or heavily discounted rates (which exists now). But it's all about implementation: simply letting anyone jump on turns the system into a madhouse. Making sure everyone pays (even if through a government issued pass) and works with the system helps balance equity considerations with maintaining safety and cleanliness.
> Discounts are fine. Free riding isn’t.
Why not? Could you not make a pretty strong argument that avoided negative externalities (CO2 and air pollution from car engines and tires) make public transport worthwhile by itself, and just fund transport by taxing those (gas/cars)?
Saves you all the infrastructure for billing/access control and some enforcement, too.
Why is free public transport bad? Could get even more folk out of their cars, or expand employment opportunities.
bart doesn't get to decide its free.
Not quite but nearly totally unrelated, but I love that Debian ships a package of a PDP-8 PAL-like cross-assembler written at BART:
Postmortem thread posted: https://x.com/SFBART/status/1920945151419003225
>The root cause of the disruption was related to network devices having intermittent connectivity. Staff in the Operations Control Center lacked the visibility of the track circuits and the train positions necessary for safe operations. Visibility of this system in the Operations Control Center is required to run service.
> BART’s Network Engineering team identified and isolated a redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it. This allowed service to begin.
A "redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it"? That sounds like some sort of network loop?
>“Once the crews isolated that exact section that had the devices that were not properly communicating to each other, they were able to just simply disconnect them,” she told KQED. “That is what allowed us to finally get service back up and running.”
Should it not be "they were able to just simply reconnect them"?
Surprise to see no exact problem been given in the article and comments section. Curious to see is it a legit computer networking problem, and if yes what they actually were? Could they install a proper fail over connection to prevent the outage in the first place?
> Due to a computer networking problem BART service is suspended system wide until further notice. Seek alternate means of transportation.
That's worth a screenshot.
Any idea whether the political and technical will is there, to post-mortem this, and make the system more robust and resilient?
"Poorer" countries with a per-capita GDP that's 1/5th of Bay Area have exceptional public transport.
How about fix the country public transport first instead of spending 2 Trillion on BS AI?
New stuff is exciting. Old stuff is boring.
Very poor countries also have exceptional public water wells where people can draw water with buckets.
That is because those are inconvenient, slow but necessary amenities in the areas where most people are poor. And that is why US currently doesn't need either.
Source: lived in a poor country with exceptional public transit and didn't ever drive till 29; and carried water with buckets from a well only a block away for an aggregate of 1-2 years.
But rich cities can also have great public transit. New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Singapore... in fact rich cities with transit as awful as the Bay Area seem to be the exception, not the rule
Equating having access to public transport with lack of running water is wild to me. A rich country is not one where poor people drive but rather one where rich people take public transport.
> A rich country is not one where poor people drive but rather one where rich people take public transport.
You've mixed a subjective measure "rich country" with an objective one "rich people." I can't think of any situation where people of greater means accept more limitations.
Anyways do you have any examples of "rich countries" that have solved this problem?
Good public transport, in a city at least, doesn't feel like a limitation! It's rather convenient, really. There is no problem with making rich people use it, they do it voluntarily.
Okay, so to come back to the goal posts, do "rich people" ride the public transit in those countries?
I'm not doing that. I am equating on a spectrum not being able to, as a society, afford running water infrastructure to not being able to afford cars and infrastructure.
Note that this includes environmental arguments - saying that 8bil people cannot all live like people in Houston may be true but it's basically saying we cannot afford to have nice things.
But the thing is US, and especially major cities, currently can afford them!
Why would "rich people take public transit"? Except for extremely dense areas, driving is faster especially accounting for overhead; goes exactly where one needs, any time; and is way more comfortable. Only those who prefer extremely dense areas and also cannot live close to work/amenities (kind of the point of density) would want it.
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Once the initial shock of “how the hell do I get to work” wore off, it was nice taking the ferry and F to SOMA. Took an extra 20 minutes, but better than the time it would have taken waiting in bridge traffic.
If the ferry+F commute is only 20 minutes longer than your car commute, why don't you do it more often?! If I was in that situation, I would never drive!
The last time I had a long car commute, it was 45-60 minutes driving, or 2+ hours via various transit options, so driving was unfortunately the only reasonable choice. But 20 minutes extra to avoid driving? I'd do that in a heartbeat.
(Hell, I do that often enough just inside SF, taking a bus or train instead of an Uber/Lyft or driving myself... sadly it's not uncommon for a 15-minute car ride to be the equivalent of a 40 minute transit ride.)
I’m worried about BART. The new gate tap scanners work so poorly, somebody really screwed those up, and they haven’t publicly explained what went wrong. I don’t understand why the media doesn’t cover this apparent bad screw up. There were a number of articles on the selection of the design and the planned rollout and the demonstrated susceptibility to ongoing fare evasion, but silence on the adverse impact on paying passengers.
Every day the last week at my station there are piles of commuters held up by the semi-broken scanners. Kudos to the front line staff down there apologizing. I am not holding my breath it’ll be fixed anytime soon.
It's interesting this is such a large problem there. In NYC, the tap-to-pay OMNY system is literally excellent. I swear it processes cards in a second or less and you save a lot of time by not buying a MetroCard. Are the BART scanners for some sort of RFID/NFC cards that are local to the train system, or do they accept credit/debit card payment? I'm curious how OMNY is so fast (compared to even going to a store and paying with tap to pay) and why BART is slow.
And OMNY will either accept a tap to pay credit card, a phone with tap to pay (including Apple's express card option, where it works even if your phone is dead), or a prepaid value dedicated OMNY card.
It does not actually run the transaction through the entire way - if a transaction fails, the card info gets placed on a blacklist and that particular NFC device won't receive an instant authorisation next time. Generally speaking, people don't have an easy way to generate lots and lots of fake NFC devices, so this hasn't been a problem for widespread fraud (vs just jumping over the turnstile).
The Clipper cards used by BART are 90s technology that took so long to fully deploy that it was outdated by the time most people started using it. There was a brief window where if you were an early adopter it was better than what was available in many places (or not-so-brief compared to OMNY, which came along a decade later), but unsurprisingly the things designed later have mostly improved on it.
The killer feature that also causes most of the quirks is that it can be used to make payments fully offline without allowing double-spending of balance. This is of course mostly a killer feature for transit operators rather than users. OMNY solves the same problem by just accepting that it'll occasionally permit free rides.
They replaced rechargeable mag stripe cards with sub-second processing time and near 100% reliability (unless the gate was offline).
I remember when the clipper cards rolled out. If I saw more than a few people holding one, I’d just go to the other gate.
I guess Clipper wasn't super reliable when it came out(?) (so long ago at this point it's hard to remember), but I don't really remember having much fondness for the old BART cards. (Not to mention the annoyance of having to pay for BART and Muni in different ways, or carrying around those silly paper Muni transfer slips.)
These days, I can't remember the last time I had an issue with my physical Clipper card. I do recall lots of issues when they first rolled out the ability to put a Clipper card on your phone, but I haven't run into a problem with that in at least a couple years.
I don't know if this is the case with BART, but I've seen in my own local public transit network an incredible inability or lack of will to use systems proven in other areas. Instead of going with quick, proven, and reliable, systems, they'll default to going for the cheap option, which is usually slow, re-inventing the wheel, and unreliable. I visit a city like NYC or London or Tokyo and see a transit system with decades of accrued understanding, technical experience, and optimization. Then I come home and ride something shiny but slow, janky, and bug ridden.
My one huge gripe with Tokyo's/Japan's transit system is that you can't load money onto an IC card using a credit card. I was just in Japan last month; my last trip before then had been in 2017, and I really assumed that they would have fixed this deficiency by now.
I forgot to get a Tokyo metro pass along with my train ticket from Narita to Tokyo, so I ended up wandering around Nippori station looking for an ATM that would take my Visa debit card so I could get some cash in order to top up my Pasmo card[0] and take a local train to Shinjuku. I'd also forgotten how most random ATMs don't take foreign debit cards; after it dawned on me, I left the station, found a 7-11, and used the ATM there.
This was not something I enjoyed having to do, while carrying my bags, after a 10-hour flight, plus 2 hours waiting in line at immigration, followed by another hour-long train ride to the city.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that many many more businesses in Japan take credit cards nowadays though.
[0] I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Pasmo cards are still good up to 10 years after the last time you use them. I feel like something similar in the US would expire after no more than a year or two.
NYC wisely decided to license London's system.
It works so well that I was severely confused the first time I used them, coming from the Bay Area. I spent ages trying to figure out how to instantiate and load a transit card into Google Wallet before realizing I could just tap any card I had.
Yesterday I went through Glen Park Bart, and every one of the scanners had a taped-on hand-written note in sharpie that said "hold 4 seconds". I doubt that the taller gates will ever pay for themselves (I thought in general fare-enforcement costs meaningfully more than systems lose in evaded fares), but I definitely don't understand why we needed to "update" gates with scanners that are clearly worse.
The gates are less about direct fare recovery and more about limiting the externalities that gate jumpers impose on other passengers. BART is definitely calmer and cleaner than it was a year ago.
The point of the new scanners is you can pay to ride with any payment instrument, not just a Clipper card.
Source on this?
> (I thought in general fare-enforcement costs meaningfully more than systems lose in evaded fares)
This is generally true for active fare enforcement, since you have to pay employees to do enforcement, there's appeals processes, and some people just don't pay the fine.
If the new faregates result in some more people (lets say 1%!) paying for trips (less freeriding), that's directly 1-2 million per year. If they also increase real-ridership, that's additional income. To make the cost back quickly you do need a significant increase (10-15%), that's not totally out of the question, though it's probably not only due to faregates.
BART isn't the only agency suffering from those new readers. The problem is the vendor, Cubic. They supply this junk to many agencies.
IIRC it’s the same sensors as the old ones
I have no idea and didn’t comment on what the sensors are. Before the new gates, they worked. Now they only half work.
I lived in DC for a few years before I moved to SF, spending a few years there as well. DC Metro is not perfect by any means, but I was really surprised at how much better transit was in the district than the bay area considering they have zero weather issues to contend with and are - ahem - home to a tremendous amount of technological talent.
My personal observations are really that California are just truly fucking terrible at this sort of thing. Ironic considering they are such a huge economy and so wealthy. In northern California PCH (pacific coast highway) has been closed for over 15 months due to a rockslide. In southern california, a huge segment of ACH (angeles crest highway, one of my favorite places on earth) has been closed since 2023! You cannot drive from one end of the range to the other at this time.
China would have fixed these issues in weeks. For all the cash and people they have, Cali really manages to drop the ball on these things constantly. Don't even get me started on high speed rail that was built out in the middle of buttfuck farmland from Madera to Shafter. Like a stairway to nowhere.
DC Metro can use funds from developing property near Metro stations. This has been one of the positive things about Metro.
The Purple line has evolved into a financial disaster. It will be the most expensive train line ever constructed, $10 billion for a 16 mile segment.
BART ridership is 40% of what it was in 2019. There's no way you can lose 60% of your customers and not have major problems.
> There's no way you can lose 60% of your customers and not have major problems.
There is a way, but (with how much they used to crow that (unlike those other big, fat, LOSER mass-transit companies in the area) 80->95% of their budget came from rider fares) the BART management pretty clearly really hates to do it: Make up the shortfall with government money.
Are they actually building housing near the new bart stations?
South Bay is doing everything it can to make sure no new houses are serviced by existing train route. They even tore out the line that ran through most of the residential areas decades ago.
That line serviced Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Gatos, the San Lorenzo Valley and Santa Cruz. It ran all the way to SF, so it must have serviced many other cities on the peninsula.
Some system wouldn't power up this morning. System is back in service now, with major delays in all directions.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/no-bart-trains-runnin...
NYC MTA has an old mechanical system in place to prevent collisions. And they also have a new system in place to keep things safe. And the directors insisted both run side by side. This delayed so many projects for so many years. It took ten years to put in place train time estimation.
I guess today those same people feel a level of validation on what they insisted.
I don't know if years of delays is better than an outage of only a few hours.
137 comments as I write this and not a single one says "spanning tree loop".
Due to human failure when operating computer systems*
Their HQ lost power yesterday, maybe related?
It seems that many BART supporters are suffering from a fatal fallacy which I also believed until recently.
What is the purpose of public transit? Do you believe that public transit is designed so that poor people can commute to jobs?
Wrong. Public transit is designed so that people can go shopping. Buses and trains move people around to shopping centers and stores and malls.
It is only by accident that poor people can commute to some jobs with public transit. There are far, far more jobs that are more-or-less unreachable by bus or train, and poor people end up walking, cycling, or moving closer to those jobs.
When I was a young child, Grandma didn't drive, and so our weekends were consumed by walking around the neighborhood, shopping and eating in restaurants. We'd hang out at the 7-Eleven playing Centipede, Missile Command, and Asteroids. We'd pick up some sodas and Cracked magazine and go home.
Then later in life, we started going to malls. None of the malls were walking-distance from Grandma's house, so we rode the bus. And I fell in love with public transit; we'd ride the bus to any one of 3-4 malls nearby, walk around to our heart's content, and ride the bus back home carrying our spoils for the day. It was always a treat to do this.
What I definitely noticed was that a lot of poor people rode the bus. What I didn't realize is that mostly, they didn't have anywhere else to go. It wasn't a matter of commuting to their jobs, but just hanging out for the day.
Here in Phoenix, most bus stations are in shopping malls, or they become de facto shopping centers, and the light rail corridor is basically a commerce incubator by the way stores and shopping centers are popping up now that the track is permanently laid down.
On the weekends it may be common to see working-class Hispanic moms take their children to church on the free buses, but the free buses are intended to get tourists and residents into the shopping areas and/or connect them to the full-fare routes so that they can really do some hardcore "shop 'til you drop" activity.
In fact, the public transit sectors that are designed for commuting are the Express buses, which have a higher base fare and serve 9-5 white-collar office workers. It's transparently upper-crust. None of those Express routes can possibly help poor people get to poor-people jobs. Express buses get people into the city center so they don't need cars there: attorneys, civil servants, accountants, clerks. That's the Express system only. The rest of transit: shopping, shopping and more shopping.
Most people I know wouldn't take Bart if it was free. Dirty, noisy, and unsafe. I can't imagine anything can be done to make Americans take trains at scale unless atleast the unsafe part is handled, and then the dirty part atleast.
Right now I am a subcontractor on a project to replace the Liebert unit in the server room that runs my metro area’s transit system, my worst nightmare is my tech calling and telling me the servers are down, glad this isn’t me!!
Did they finally run out of old new stock 5.25-inch floppy disks?
That was my guess.
it's always DNS
Sometimes it's an ethernet loop.
I would like to find the person who started this stupid meme and shake them by the neck.
The majority of times it's SSL.
The network guys ducked up again.
to some extent SSL depends on DNS lol
I took a trip to Europe last month and watching America fail at all manners of transportation is embarrassing
Ok, but please don't post flamebait, including nationalistic flamebait, to HN threads. It just leads to flamewar hell.
Trust me it’s embarrassing for a lot of us that have traveled to countries with decent rail travel. Part of it is the shamelessness of the car industry for lobbying for decades to shackle everyone to a car. Now the car is an engrained part of American culture and makes our cities much more ugly, isolating, loud, and dangerous than they need be.
You must not travel very often then. European public transit is extremely unreliable due to strikes. I, as a tourist, have been screwed over countless times having to pay $150 to take an Uber to an airport that is nowhere near the city it's meant to service. It's so unreliable that in some cities the brand new trains have displays that show which lines are currently having strikes. Now that's embarrassing.
You can just say Germany
Hey, at least we're ahead in self-driving cars!
But yes, public transit in the states is rather pathetic.
They can even go through specially bored tunnels! Oh wait...
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That's not exactly common. You might say it's very very rare. Probably as rare as in US.
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Now this could make a great anime episode.
My free square is one of their control computers’ parallel ports frying out and now they’re unable to find a replacement because they buy them all as old stock off of ebay [1].
The ports are used as hard realtime GPIO so if some of the electrical isolation failed downstream, it could take out the motherboard. Back before Vista’s security model change, drivers could fill DMA buffers to the parallel ports controller and get hard realtime time outputs on Windows so there’s a quite lot of old industrial control systems running on a thread.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-...
Wow that takes me back. My graduate physics experiment ran on two MS-DOS computers with Turbo Pascal programs exercising the parallel ports. Each machine had a grotesque board that I made, with multiple ADC and DAC channels. I finished in 1993. By that time, of course, everything was obsolete, but I wasn't going to delay my project by upgrading.
Obsolete is good! Hobbyists running mini CNCs and converting old manual Bridgeports exploited the obsoleteness well into the 2010s by buying up really cheap old machines to run Windows XP with MachCNC, which could drive the CNC via parallel port (with a proper expansion board, which used to be the expensive part).
It wasn't until the microcontrollers got powerful enough and Stratasys FDM patents expired that open source Klipper/Marlin firmware from the 3d printer community replaced MachCNC.
Indeed, PC interfacing was what got me into microcontrollers. I had already mastered microprocessor interfacing and coding, but on desktop machines. Our lab got a Mac, and the only reasonable interface port was serial. So it made sense to put a MCU on the other end of that serial port, to continue my explorations. I still had to program the MCU with my MS-DOS machine, using a device programmer that I hacked together -- using the parallel port, and a freeware 8051 assembler.
Today, that MCU is a Teensy.
Would be surprised if they didn't have optoisolators to cater for that scenario
> My free square is one of their control computers’ parallel ports frying out and now they’re unable to find a replacement because they buy them all as old stock off of ebay
The last time I experienced a BART shutdown, the cause was that someone had found a box in one of the stations somewhere, and they (1) assumed it was a bomb; and (2) shut down the entire system. I'm not sure what stopping the trains while you investigate the bomb you've found accomplishes, but I don't think there were efforts to find additional bombs. (The box was not actually a bomb.)
Forgive my arrogance, but nothing presented in that article should be such a big blocker. Spare parts for the traction gear sure, but none of the computing "problems" make any sense.
It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably.
This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
I'd wager it is technically a "cheaper" problem, but I'd also consider the axis that this is public transit, an industry known for being neglected budget-wise. Reverse engineering/reimplementation with competent parties may be laughably out of budget.
No, but like roads, public transit leads to greater economic activity and boosts GDP. Good public transit also increases social and financial mobility, makes other clean air targets easier to hit, and decreases medical costs [0] while increasing the number of financially-productive hours a citizen can work - because a healthier citizen is a more economically productive one.
America seems utterly incapable of grasping many second-order effects. For another example, look to the ROI of investing in the (coninuously underfunded) IRS [1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4917017/
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-tax-audits-recover-12-do...
It sounds even more like decades of low budgets.
> There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages.
Loud explosions happen all the time in SF. Particularly in the Lower Nob Hill / Tenderloin area.
I lived an Lower Nob Hill for many years and heard countless explosions, most often in the middle of the night (2am-4am) or early hours (6am). Often times these explosions M80s-M1000s being dropped and detonated.
Someone was arrested back in 2019 and the explosions reduced dramatically.
This article[0] goes into detail about it.
[0]: https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythica...
I thought I heard that explosion and then just attributed it to a dream. Thanks for confirming
> wildly guess it is a DNS issue
Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular.
Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.
Sorry I will ruin the mystique:
It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.
Oh, that just updates the AAAA record for the Waymo. Totally harmless.
Do Not Slide. So just hit that if you lose traction, or if you're having a hard time getting your kid out of the park.
I don't see any reason other than sheer speculation to suspect a cyberattack. It can just as easily have been some car crashed into a fiber optic thingy.
The last time in recent memory there was a large BART disruption it had been caused by a motorcyclist who somehow flung himself over a fence into the trackway and died. That stopped service in and north of Oakland, which is more than half of the system by riders.
All sheer speculation--the reference to cyberattack was from a now dead comment suggesting it was ransomware.
It doesn't seem likely to be a physical obstruction on the tracks, though, as the entire system is down and trains aren't running anywhere. I don't know if that's happened before.
Wow, you might have called the DNS issue. Nice. Can't be DNS, can't be DNS... It's DNS.
From the article: "Once the crews isolated that exact section that had the devices that were not properly communicating to each other, they were able to just simply disconnect them,” she told KQED. “That is what allowed us to finally get service back up and running.”