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Funny, but their current problems just might be related to recent upgrades.

Previously I mentioned rail bonding,or lack there of (stolen) as an issue that could send some serious inductive spikes into the 1000VDC motor control systems.

Along that line, I bet when the BART system was first built in the 70's they used standard rail lengths ~40-45ft, while each rail car length the was in 70 to 75 ft long. Thus a single rail segment bonding failure was unlikely to cause an issue with multiple pick up brushes per car. Here's the kicker, Modern rail segment lengths are in the 160 to 200ft range, thus subjecting each car to all the electrical vulgarities(loss of redundancy, and current spikes) that entails.

Previously, when a car traversed a bonding fault boundary it might have to take up the 1/2 a load of one additional car due the a rail bonding failure on single 40-45ft segment. But, with longer rail lengths, a BART car crossing a defective bonding point on a 200ft rail segment could be subject to 3 or 4 additional cart loads and/or braking system feedback(huge spikes).

Solution increase the number of redundant flex bonds(both power and ground) on each longer rail segment. Note: Adding additional subber caps won't help.

This seems to me to be an article promoting the new (probably very expensive!) BART train cars I have to say that they look pretty good. The first ones are due toward the end of this year.

Alas, in the DC Metro, any drink (beer, coffee, water, etc.) can get you a $100 fine.

Looks like the BART may also ban eating and drinking in the "Paid Areas" with a possible $250 fine and 48 hours of community service.

It's still a tunnel at the bottom of a bay crossing a tectonic boundary. That takes the kind of engineering chutzpah that Californians - even Democrats - used to be capable of.

You're still wrong:

McArthur noted that the Transbay Tube was designed from the beginning with seismic safety as a priority because, while the tube does not run directly over any fault lines, all of the Bay Area is earthquake country,

and lets take San Francisco Bay as our example (since I live here and have first hand knowledge and experience). VTA handles "some" of the South Bay, but limited to North San Jose and Mountain View.

VTA Buses go from Palo Alto to Fremont to South SJ to Gilroy. The light rail, from Mt. View down to Los Gatos and east San Jose to the Alameden valley area of SJ....in fact...just...here's the map: http://www.vta.org/getting-aro... (VTA focuses on SJ because it--SJ--has grown like a cancer or ambeoba, absorbing smaller communites, until it's most of the urban South Bay).

Caltrain handles a single strip running North to south from North San Jose to South (not the city) San Francisco.

Wrong. It goes from from SF (right next to AT&T Park) down to downtown SJ regularly, extending to Gilroy (30 miles south of the downtown SJ station) during "traditional" commute times (ie, not the 10a-8pm Valley standard time). Here's their map: http://www.caltrain.com/statio...

Bart handles SF -> Oakland, and a straight line down to Fremont.

Wrong. BART goes to SFO and Millbrae (and where it shares a station with CalTrain) up through SF and into the East Bay, extending from Richmond down to Fremont and out to Dublin/Pleasanton and Pittsburg/Baypoint. Here's BART's map: http://www.bart.gov/stations

These systems don't connect, use different payment systems, have different rates, and are _MORE_ expensive than driving.

The one bit that's true, but due to the compound sentence ends up being wrong. Connections are a pain in the ass, but the Clipper card is accepted by BART, CalTrain, VTA, SamTrans (San Mateo's bus service), Almeda Transit, MUNI (SF's transit system), plus more. Oh, and both VTA and SamTrans have stops at or near (ie, a block or two) almost all CalTrain stations on the Peninsula (the Atherton station is at least one exception) and VTA has service up to Fremont's southernmost BART station (and VTA is in the process of extending BART into east San Jose--it's not their fault that in the 1950s & 60s San Mateo and Santa Clara residents opted out of the BART system). And add into that that we're talking about five counties (SF, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa) with all the territorialism and desire for control that brings with it (leading to different fare schedules, subsidies, etc.).

Taking our "cheap" (said with a hearty chuckle) mass transit is extremely expensive and time consuming.

Trip from Mt. View to Twitter's HQ (in SF): Leave around 8am. Car: 40-45 mines, $17.64 (31.5 mi at $.56 per mile); starting from Shoreline & 101 (hell, saving you driving from the CalTrain station to 101). (via Trulia's map...it looks like Google maps will no longer let you specify the time for traffic projections and 1am is actually one of the times the freeways are relatively empty). Pub: 1:03, $9.50: Mt. View CalTrain station to end of line in SF, then 38X followed by 2 minutes of walking (per 551.org). Oh, and you can read, sleep, etc. on the train. Plus, monthly passes and commute FSA will reduce that cost.

Yet instead of addressing the problems with mass transit, California is dumping many billions into a train from Fresno to Sacramento. Go figure..

True, but the train is also supose to go to SF, SJ, LA, and SD (PDF of rail proj

Haque gives the example of a commuter travelling from Millbrae Station to the south of San Francisco to the downtown station, Embarcadero, a journey that costs $4.50. Another commuter travelling from Glen Park in San Francisco to Berkeley on the other side of the Bay pays $4.20. So together they have to fork out $8.70.

But if these commuters meet and swap tickets, it’s possible for them to pay $5.10 (Millbrae to Berkeley) and $1.85 (Glen Park to Embarcadero) or a total of $6.95. That’s a saving of $1.70 or 20 per cent.

An interesting point is that there is no transfer station between Glen Park and Embarcadero. The person going from Glenn Park to Berkeley would have to go in the other direction to Balboa park or the person going to Embarcadero would have to go to 19th St/Oakland. This would require one of them to reverse direction and I am wondering if it one even has access to trains traveling in both directions at the transfer stations.

In the end, is traveling out of your way, searching for the person to transfer the ticket to and making an extra transfer really worth saving $1.70 a day?

Wrong. The BART has its own police force, unless I'm wrong. But I'm not.

You've got quite the self-righteous attitude going on. In your first message, you just said "a cop". Perhaps you mean an officer of the BART Police Department in charge of ticketing toll jumpers, or perhaps you meant an off-duty Oakland police officer coming home from traffic duty. Don't blame us for information you don't include.

Wrong. The BART has its own police force, unless I'm wrong. But I'm not.

From the Bart website;

When you enter BART, insert your ticket into the fare gate and it will be returned to you. Use the same ticket when you exit

By using one ticket when you enter and another when you exit you are breaking the rules.

Does San Francisco not run buses on the same lines? If not, the problem is with the city, not Google.

The problem is with the entire region. San Francisco buses can only run in San Francisco, with limited service to a couple recreational areas a few miles away. The rest of the region doesn't want to get caught up in San Francisco's myriad governance issues, so they operate their own transit systems. There are only a couple systems that cross the entire region: BART and Caltrain.

So, to get from my home to Google via existing transit lines, I'd have to take a bus to Caltrain, then take Caltrain to Mountain View, and then take a bus to Google. The pretty good regional trip planner says that it would take me 4 buses, 2 hours, and $13 to get from my home in San Francisco to Google, even with rush hour express service. It's cheaper if I get monthly passes and take my bike onto Caltrain, but it still takes a lot of time.

It's not the idea that's important, it's the execution that matters.

For proof of this, just take a look at any public transportation app in the Market/App store for your area. In my area, there are many apps that deal with the BART transportation system for instance, and yet if you read the user reviews of those same apps in their respective app stores/market, none of the users believe that any of those apps are equivalent in terms of functionality/usability.

And if your area doesn't publish reliable next-bus information publicly, then any extra work you do crowdsourcing/collecting the data, correcting/massaging the data, and updating it at different intervals, will help you differentiate the quality of your app vs. the quality of the app of your competitors.

Actually, you'd probably be better off complaining to the elected members of the BART Board of Directors. I don't know who Molly Burke is, but SF's three BART directors are: Lynette Sweet, James Fang, and Tom Radulovich. Of the three, the first two are jokes better left ignored. Sweet is trying to use BART as a stepping stone to higher public office. Fang is, what? The only republican left in San Francisco? He's the guy who sees BART as a way to bring pork to SF. That leaves us with Radulovich, whose district actually encompasses Civic Center station. He's also the only director to have the balls to call out BART for making atrocious decisions, and the only one with some sort of interest in transit (beyond BART as a political platform). You wanna write to someone and get some sympathy, write to him. You wanna write to someone who will pander to whatever they think the constituents wanna hear, write to the latter.

And that's the problem with BART. This wasn't one rogue employee making a bad call, this is a structural problem.

In any case time for some shameless self-promotion: Let's take this thing as seriously or not as is deserved. Cheap shots aimed at BART available in thongs, onesies, iPad cases, and, of course, t-shirts and hoodies. Someone (aside from the EFF) had to go there.

No, the real Springfield is in Illinois. Here are some excerpts from today's paper.

The nice thing about Springfield is the bright, pretty colors and its cartoon downtown. We have an alderman Simpson, the mayor is a dead ringer for Quimby and the head of the power plant is a dead ringer for Mr. Burns. I've seen Popeye, Olive Oyle, Little Orphan Annie, Betty Boop, and a raft of other characters here. Especially when I was tripping on Paxil.

Bart's in San Fransisco.

One hand taketh, another hand giveth.
http://www.bart.gov/developers/
It appears that BART has said to the scrapers; "Here is the data you need in raw form along with some suggested tools you can integrate our schedules into your applications."
On the whole, it looks like BART has embraced these applications rather than raise a stink on them.

Thought I would take a look at the local transit system and see if they had similar restrictions.

http://www.bart.gov/siteinfo/copyright.aspx

Sure seems like it!

"Copyright
  All content on the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) website (http://www.bart.gov) including the collection, arrangement, assembly and presentation of pages and all logos, maps, text, images, feeds and databases are the property of BART or its content suppliers and are protected by copyright laws.

You may not use the BART logo, the BART map or any other content from the BART website without express written permission in advance from BART."

It appears the ezrider.bart.gov issue is simply one of configuration.

http://ezrider.bart.gov/ times out.
https://ezrider.bart.gov/ does not.

It appears the ezrider.bart.gov issue is simply one of configuration.

http://ezrider.bart.gov/ times out.
https://ezrider.bart.gov/ does not.

Same here.

I hated rigid schedules to the point that I quit and started my own company. I saw it as an obsolete business model. My office building choice was primarily based on proximity to public transit. I wanted to be located directly adjacent to a BART station http://www.bart.gov/

I am paying a premium price for it, but it takes cars off the road and gives people some extra time during commute to actually be productive rather than wasting time in traffic. In the long run, this will probably create a headache for me as I am not aware of campus sized space directly adjacent to the station. As we grow, we'll be covering BART expenses for employees as a benefit. See http://www.commutercheck.com/

So, obviously, none of your transit system offer monthly passes. At 9.50 a day, that's $285 a month. I don't know of any public transit system that charges that high of a rate for a monthly pass. It's usually under $100 for most transit systems. A quick look at the BART website shows that you can get deals if you don't buy your tickets one at a time. Plus it's a little more convenient to not have to buy a ticket every time you need one. Also, your 36 minutes in the car that you are driving is 36 minutes in which you can do nothing but drive. If you spend 98 minutes on the bus/train each day, then there's other things you can be doing with your time that you spend commuting. You could even to work, and see if you can bill for the time since you are actually working. Does it really matter that you aren't physically in your office. Plus according to the AAA, driving a car on average costs between $5500-$7000 a year. So maybe you're on the lower end of the average, but I don't think your numbers are that accurate.

The SF Bay Area is not built like the New York or Boston metropolitan areas, so we can't have the same sort of system, but BART is mediocre at best. I don't know whom they bribed to win the transportation award the other year, but that doesn't change anything. In addition to parent's gripes, I'll add inflexible pricing: there is something like a 2% senior discount, children under three weeks of age are free, and everybody else pays full price. Okay, maybe that's exaggerating. But there are no passes available at all for "volume" riders, like practically all other transportation systems have. You can buy a $48 ticket (i.e., good for $48 worth of rides--pricing is station-to-station) for $45 or something like that, but that's about it.

Presumably they just need to port this. Or maybe this.

I've been using the Palm version for years.

Presumably they just need to port this. Or maybe this.

I've been using the Palm version for years.

I run my own subway tool the BARTsmart BART Widget, an AJAX-powered Mac OS X widget that displays BART schedules and news. I too was contacted by BART regarding my use of the BART logo so it wasn't a surprise that the ipod map guy was contacted too.

The upside is, the rules are pretty lax. All he needed to do was interpret the copyrighted map and create his own version. How strict that is I don't know... perhaps all you need to do is run the original map through a Photoshop/GIMP filter.

I think you might be mistaking BART for Caltrain or Muni in the bay area. Bart runs on its own tracks, alternates as elevated or underground, 105 miles of track (no street crossings that I am aware of). The original spec average was 45 mph including stops, but I think actual is a little less than that.

I've found that puns are quite common in newspaper article titles, actually. A recent headline was "BART fares poorly in cost comparison."

Sullivan, who also helped develop an automated line for San Francisco Municipal Railway in the 1980s, said he knows of no serious problems from hacking or malfunction.

Yeah! Because they stopped using the automated equipment in the 90s when they put in a new system which has been a nightmare!
BART, on the other hand is excellent. They're currently working on AATC (advanced automated train control), which has a few advantages over the original ATC. Hopefully it will spread to other systems, as it is being developed by the DOD.

That sound you just heard was every slashdot reader in the SF bay area falling out of their chairs from shock. It's news to me that these are 'excellent' systems.

I found it impressive - clean, easy to figure out, able to get me where I wanted to go. But maybe it just looks good in comparison. :-)

The only problem I had was in planning to take the F from the Fisherman's Wharf area to Market Street on a Saturday afternoon, right after there had apparently been a big abortion rights rally. This didn't work out so good. But I was able to change plans on the fly since there are bus route maps all over the place - that is a rare and beautiful thing.

and oddly enough, it doesn't connect to CalTrain

I thought I remembered seeing a connection when I looked at the maps, and according to the website is connects up at Millbrae. Maybe that's new.

That must have been a long time ago. I started using the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in 1996. At that time, if you exited from the same station that you entered, your ticket got about $1.25 deducted from it.

The Transbay Tunnel: San Francisco,CA built in 1967, 6.1 kilometers submarine

Ok, it wasn't a BSOD, but the other day I was coming home from work and one of the fancy new BART ticket machines had a Windows desktop (with icons for IE, Outlook, Recycle Bin etc.) instead of the ticket issuing application and an error dialog saying something about being unable to start a service.

On a related note, here in San Fransicso, one of the local mass-transit groups (the subway, basically) is nearly done updating their circa-1970's fare gates and machines. The new ticket vendors are especially ATM-like, which has been a big deal, as the old machines were (from a UI standpoint) practically unusable.

Anyhow, the new machines look great, nice bright screens, clear directions... and when they go belly-up, they're running some variant of min-1990's Windows: NT, I'd guess. One of the machines was stuck on the desktop the other day ("oh look, the ticket machine's got Excel")

The new machines -- like the ones they replace -- take cash, credit and ATM cards. The credit card functionality seems to go up and down (mostly down). ATM is less flaky, seeming to operate only on days with an even number of letters in their name. I haven't dared to feed one of those guys a real card since I saw that desktop grinning at me... urk.

Sounds like I'd better stock up on $20s before our new ATM Overlords take over and SoBig my credit rating.

A related issue is that of linking up major metropolitan areas.

Who decided that San Jose should get a Light Rail system that is wholely incompatible with BART. If they had thought for maybe a second, the entire Bay Area could be linked by one complete system.

The same goes for Baltimore's Light Rail and Washington's Metro. Sure, they're about 25 miles apart now... but eventually they'll converge. When they converge they'll be incompatible.

I'm no transit expert, but it seems like it is COMPLETELY RETARDED to have adjacent metropolitan areas building incompatible systems.

And what crackhead decided to build Seattle's Bus Tunnels. That's just weird.

Las Vegas' Monorail (that's right, MONORAIL!) will be cool but doesn't go very far and is a couple of LARGE blocks off The Strip.

Actually in my hardware design class, the project was to design a PDP-8 computer using VHDL. We used an FPGA, although I don't remember the exact model. BTW, I believe BART still uses PDP-8 computers to control the signals in its system.

Who sticks a $20 in a vending machine?

Buyers of postage stamps and BART cards, for two.

Well, sure, except that BART riders only pay half the cost. The rest comes from taxpayers, few of whom ride the train. Sure the service is good... with no need to break even, they can make is as good as they want it to be; they'll just go to Sacramento or Washington to make up the losses. If CSX did this, you (and I) would be pretty pissed

Any way you slice it, the cost per passenger mile is much higher by rail than by car. Putting it under government control simply hides the costs.

Passengers on packed trains could unwittingly be exposed to electromagnetic fields far higher than those recommended under international guidelines. The problem? Hordes of commuters all using their mobile phones at the same time.

...

This should be an example to anyone designing a web site distributing customer information, in my opinion.

but I'm heading out to the San Francisco area in the next two weeks and am looking for a geek pad myself, to crash at for a few months to a year. Anyone within 50 miles of SF? =)

Well, I'm in the City, but we're pretty full up -- We've got 5 Linux boxen, 2 Win95 boxes, 2 Win98, 1 Win3.11, 3 Macs, 1 MS-DOS box, plus miscellaneous others. We've got ethernet running through the walls to half the house, and 6 phone lines (7 soon, if I can get approval from the CFO (the wife)).

We're pretty lucky, though -- we have a pretty small mortgage. Figure on at least $2k/mo just for rent if you want an actual house, and $1k or more per month for a simple studio. And if you drive, gas is about the most expensive in the whole country (over $2/gal for reg. unleaded). Of course, we've also got BART, MUNI, and lots of other public transit. And, there aren't many other places I would ever want to live.