Point of a single agency is not just to collect taxes. It is to make sure there are better outcomes, so that when you do need more taxes to fund public transit, you don’t get the pushback from the public.
Absolutely not.
Discounts are fine. Free riding isn’t.
People don’t value free things, and it’s hard to plan things without pricing demand.
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.
2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
If you live in a region of the world that doesn’t have these issues, great, do what you want. We’re talking about the Bay Area specifically, and the thing keeping BART ridership down is that people don’t want to ride BART because it sucks. The actual service is mostly fine. The issue lies in the people.
I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay. In the years prior to the new fare gates being installed, I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.
> I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
And as for funding shortfall, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You don’t fund transit, the agency needs to make cuts, making it less reliable, less safe and reducing capacity. Once that happens, even fewer people ride transit, creating even more funding deficits. This also increases the unwillingness of people to fund transit.
We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
Public transit should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket revenue. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.
>I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay.
Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.
Living in a car-dependent world significantly drives up housing costs for everyone in the region. Many of BART's stations are surrounded by and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage, which is ridiculous.
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.
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.
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
Having someone pay just to wave off someone is incredibly customer-hostile. Besides, how many people are even committing fraud like that?
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.
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.
“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)
The main problem which BART cannot fix is that the trains usually don't go to where you want to go.
[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-...
My links are worth clicking:
http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea.html
https://goldenstatswarrior.substack.com/p/the-great-migratio...
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!?
Plus: Oakland is actually building homes for people while SF remains laughably behind on building quotas.
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.
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.
It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.
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.
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.
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-...
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"
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.)
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...
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.”
But yes, public transit in the states is rather pathetic.
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?
The majority of times it's SSL.
How about fix the country public transport first instead of spending 2 Trillion on BS AI?
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.
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.
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?
Rich countries that have good public transit? Sure, that's easy.
Denmark Singapore Japan Germany Switzerland France UK ...
Here are some middle income countries that have good public transit also:
China Spain Portugal Italy Taiwan
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/no-bart-trains-runnin...
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...
CoffeeOnWrite•8h ago
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.
abeppu•8h ago
scarmig•8h ago
jeffbee•7h ago
a_t48•3h ago
jeffbee•3h ago
joshuamorton•2h ago
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.
kaladin-jasnah•8h ago
trollbridge•7h ago
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).
beezlebroxxxxxx•7h ago
Symbiote•3m ago
0_____0•7h ago
plorkyeran•6h ago
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.
jeffbee•7h ago
whalesalad•6h ago
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.
Hilift•22m ago
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.
a_t48•6h ago
CoffeeOnWrite•6h ago