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Why BART Is Falling Apart
HughPickens.com writes: Matthias Gafni writes in the San Jose Mercury News that the engineers who built BART, the rapid transit system serving the San Francisco Bay Area that started operation in 1972, used principles developed for the aerospace industry rather than tried-and-true rail standards. And that's the trouble. "Back when BART was created, (the designers) were absolutely determined to establish a new product, and they intended to export it around the world," says Rod Diridon. "They may have gotten a little ahead of themselves using new technology. Although it worked, it was extremely complex for the time period, and they never did export the equipment because it was so difficult for other countries to install and maintain." The Space Age innovations have made it more challenging for the transit agency to maintain the BART system from the beginning. Plus, the aging system was designed to move 100,000 people per week and now carries 430,000 a day, so the loss of even a single car gets magnified with crowded commutes, delays and bus bridges. For example, rather than stick to the standard rail track width of 4 feet, 8.5 inches, BART engineers debuted a 5-foot, 6-inch width track, a gauge that remains to this day almost exclusive to the system. Industry experts say the unique track width necessitates custom-made wheel sets, brake assemblies and track repair vehicles.
Another problem is the dearth of readily available replacement parts for BART's one-of-a-kind systems. Maintenance crews often scavenge parts from old, out-of-service cars to avoid lengthy waits for orders to come in; sometimes mechanics are forced to manufacture the equipment themselves. "Imagine a computer produced in 1972," says David Hardt. "No one is supporting that old equipment any longer, but those same microprocessors are what we have controlling our logic systems." Right now BART needs 100 thyristors at a total cost of $100,000. BART engineers said it could take 22 weeks to ship them to the San Francisco Bay Area to replace in BART's "C" cars, which make up the older cars in the fleet. Right now, the agency has none. Nick Josefowitz says it makes no sense to dwell on design decisions made a half-century ago. "I think we need to use what we have today and build off that, rather than fantasize what could have been done in the past. The BART system was state of the art when it was built, and now it's technologically obsolete and coming to the end of its useful life."
Another problem is the dearth of readily available replacement parts for BART's one-of-a-kind systems. Maintenance crews often scavenge parts from old, out-of-service cars to avoid lengthy waits for orders to come in; sometimes mechanics are forced to manufacture the equipment themselves. "Imagine a computer produced in 1972," says David Hardt. "No one is supporting that old equipment any longer, but those same microprocessors are what we have controlling our logic systems." Right now BART needs 100 thyristors at a total cost of $100,000. BART engineers said it could take 22 weeks to ship them to the San Francisco Bay Area to replace in BART's "C" cars, which make up the older cars in the fleet. Right now, the agency has none. Nick Josefowitz says it makes no sense to dwell on design decisions made a half-century ago. "I think we need to use what we have today and build off that, rather than fantasize what could have been done in the past. The BART system was state of the art when it was built, and now it's technologically obsolete and coming to the end of its useful life."
Yeah yeah you can go on about economies of scale all you like but if there is a tangible benefit to doing something your way then why accede to the creed of mass production?
As one who rides Washington D.C.'s metro rail every day risking death by electrical fire, shooting and/or mugging I feel your pain.
Lack of money, lack of expertise, lack lack lack
I suspect BART and DC's Metro have similar problems (even though the funding sources are a little different)
Can eat my shorts.
The fact that something is old does not mean it's ipso facto obsolete or that its design principles haven't remained sound. Conversely, the fact that something just got posted on github yesterday and uses the latest node.js and boost libraries doesn't mean it's been well designed. These are very different things.
I've rarely ever taken the BART and don't live in the the Bay any more, let alone the San Francisco proper, but it'd be nice to have an analysis that doesn't conflate the two.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Save money by firing all the "drivers" since they absolutely aren't necessary (the trains are automated; the only reason they keep the driver around is to push the "start" button as a concession to unions). Then reinvest that money in actual maintenance costs.
it's 40 years old at this point which is about the time that most big transit projects need a lot of money to rebuild and upgrade the system
"Parsons Brinckerhoff- Tudor Bechtel, the districts consulting engineers, said that exhaustive studies show the wide gauge provides great stability and smoother riding qualities for the rapid transit trains.”
Those b*stards again. So, the nonstandard gauge was a "bright idea" from a consulting company. I don't suppose suitcases full of cash were involved at any point in the process? Any politicians get cozy retirement jobs?
I'm getting skeptical and pessimistic in my old age, but it would seem to me, that "standard gauge" would always be a cheaper alternative, and that "smoother riding qualities" is fairly low on the list of things voters might want to pay for in a transit system, probably coming behind "staying within the budget", "lower maintenance costs" and "on-time operation".
We have a new street car here in KC. I haven't ridden it, but I'm seeing a lot on the evening news about how the curbside parking spaces are too narrow. Park anything larger than a subcompact in one of those spaces right up against the curb, and the street car will hook your car as it passes and drag it down the street. It's causing some controversy.
They're extending BART into Silicon Valley — 30 years late. Your tax dollars at work.
http://www.vta.org/bart/
Also used in India. This could be foresight on the part of BARTs designers, as they anticipated accommodating increased ridership by placing passengers on top of the cars. The wider gauge is more stable and less likely to shake them off.
Have gnu, will travel.
Due to the volumes of documentation available, BART is the longest section in the book "Great Planning Disasters". But the failures are human and the disaster started with the initial lies. After authorization of the new district and system failed a couple times at the polls, it was finally approved at the ballot as a system that was promised to be fully funded by fare-box revenue. It was designed with the idea of maintaining San Francisco as the economic core of the Bay Area. And almost everything was non-standard. They assumed people would drive to nearby stations then transfer to BART. That didn't happen at the rates expected and they *still* have a severe lack of parking. They claim they are getting over 20-times the customers they originally predicted and they *still* can't cover costs.
When it couldn't be built on budget, a temporary 0.5% sales-tax was imposed throughout the district. When it couldn't even come close to covering costs from the fare-box, the tax became permanent. I now pay for BART through sales-tax, property-tax and various federal and state subsidies. Despite this, a couple years ago the BART directors claimed they had a "surplus" and reduced fares. This when the tracks howl due to insufficient maintenance and, obviously, things are falling apart.
BART has had 40 years to save and plan for maintenance and upgrades and has utterly and completely failed to do so. Now that they have suddenly figured out that stuff wears out, they want 3.5 billion more.
Answering critics of the California high-speed-rail projects a state politician responded, "they said that about BART in the beginning, too." I fear he is all too correct.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
This could have been fixed or delayed with some foresight. If you know a part that can fail is in short supply, you don't wait until it fails to order another one. Maybe the budget isn't there, which is a failure of the people who control the purse strings, but it seems to be easily resolved, or prevented by ordering ahead of time.
They didn't invest in upgrading the system and kicked the can down the road. Just like all other infrastructure projects.
I am from the government, and I am here to help.
http://wrightstate.tumblr.com/post/74408097647/turning-points-a-sculpture-built-by-artist-david
Oh, not *that* BART...
We have schools throughout the country that are asking for voter approval for huge bonds to upgrade or replace their aging schools.
One school district near me tries to get voter sympathy by giving tours of its boiler rooms and showcasing a 60 year old boiler (that still works BTW).
During one of the trips a person on the tour asked our tour guide "The boilers didn't become 60 years old overnight - why didn't the school board put some money away every year for future maintenance and upgrades?"
I suspect BART is also the victim of failing to plan for the future. Entropy always wins. No system exists that will not need maintenance or repair in the future. It is foolish to defer maintenance and upgrades and shows a lack of stewardship by the managers of that system.
To the surprise of no one - the $70 million bond request by the school district was voted down by a 3 to 1 measure.
Really, I think this is the problem with all of our major metro transportation systems. Almost all of them are still running 30-40 year old technology, day in and day out. Meanwhile, many millions of dollars have poured in to the system to keep it functional -- but that money was too often spent on questionably necessary staff associated with the programs, or on overpriced parts for obsolete equipment, vs. saved up for incremental upgrades and replacement of equipment.
Speaking for the DC area metro system (since living in the area, I know it best)? We may not have the non-standard track gauge that BART has, but certainly, the majority of our metro cars are older models that really need to be taken out of service permanently. Several times a week, I ride on a metrorail car that has a blown speaker, making the announcements difficult to understand. There's regularly a train pulled out of service, causing delays for the trains behind it -- typically due to a door not closing or opening properly. The older cars have vastly inferior sign-boards inside to tell riders what stop is next. And the interiors look awful .... torn seats, disgusting carpet on the floors, and windows with different size rubber gaskets around them so you can spot which ones needed replacing (but they couldn't find perfectly matching replacement parts). Even the frames that advertising goes in need some improvement. I'm always seeing signs where the paper ad is starting to fall out. (I'd sure hate to be the company that paid good money for that ....) And it's so rare I see a metrorail car with the hanging straps on it for standing riders to hold onto, I'd assume they decided to eliminate those on purpose .... except I saw a car or two that still had them. So I guess the old ones just all disintegrated and were never replaced?
I get the idea that "regular maintenance" just involves replacing bad brakes or worn out wheels .... "show stopper" problems that keep a car from rolling down the track, essentially. But you can't keep doing that indefinitely.
"The BART system was state of the art when it was built, and now it's technologically obsolete and coming to the end of its useful life.
That's about the only useful sentence in the entire article. They complain about the non-standard width, the parts, the custom controllers, the space-age light weight design, all mixed together. Most of it is however just old, obsolete technology and lack of funding. And it is not true that the light weight design was a wrong move. Europe is trying to go towards lighter subway cars. The track width? Paris had at some point three different subway systems coexisting. Other cities have wide and narrow gauge with a dual-track system for the parts of the city where the lines intersect. The voltage isn't a problem, several European manufacturers build engines that can run on different voltage systems.
If there was appropriate funding, BART could update their control system and order new light weight cars with modern electronics either by (a) getting new cars from (probably) a European company offering to make their existing design a foot wider, or (b) switch some lines to standard gauge, with some lines being dual gauge.
Many of these issues apply to the SkyTrain system here in Vancouver. High-tech (for its time), wildly non-standard, minimal adoption by anybody else (Scarborough RT, Detroit Muggermover, partially London DLR), far more expensive than an off-the-shelf system like they use in Calgary or Portland, showing its age after only 30 years...the list goes on.
They had issues when they added a new line in 2002, and the control system suddenly had to handle more than 256 cars at a time.
...laura
"Industry experts say the unique track width necessitates custom-made wheel sets, brake assemblies and track repair vehicles."
Of course it does, which is why sticking with a entrenched standard sometimes makes perfect sense. Rail infrastructure is one of those standards.
I remember some debate about this from waaaaaay back when, and most people who understood the change thought it was idiotic and pointless.
Some of the claims used to support the non-standard rail-width were that the wider rails would provide a smoother, more stable ride.
The difference in rail-width is only about 10 inches (56.5" compared to 66") and there is no real evidence that the smoothness of the ride or stability is significantly better. It was all bullshit from the get-go.
No one was complaining about the smoothness or stability of standard rail cars, it was made up out of whole cloth as a "problem" to be "solved". But there never WAS a problem. It would have been just as valid to claim that the wider rails "would keep tigers from eating the passengers".
More than a few people predicted the current problems (spare parts issues, expensive custom fixes, etc) and they were told to shut up and "stop impeding progress", basically. They were ignored, but now I guess they're getting the last laugh.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Here in Europe we have metro for a century now. You can bay cars from Spain to Moscow and they will work. In my city we had russian cars but now they bought cars from France.
Yeah, stick to one standard, do not invent more if you don't need to. Saves moniez.
The most freightening words
I saw what you did there.
It seems to me a standard rail track width of 4 feet, 8.5 inches, fits inside the custom Bart track. How about upgrading one line at a time and using all new current tech in 2016 so at least you jump from 1972 by 44 years. Maybe you will get another 30-40 years from it, more if you are lucky.
JJ
Let's not use Java/Php and an RDBMS, let's use node.js and Hadoop because it sounds new and cool. What could go wrong?
Indian Railways that carries 23 million passengers a day, 50 times more than BART, uses the 5' 6" gauge. It is the most popular and broadly used gauge in the world railways. May be BART can import trucks/bogies and wheel sets from India. But India is also facing a severe manufacturing capacity crunch. It desperately needs more rolling stock and locomotives. As does Pakistan. And Pakistan's imported Chinese locomotives are plagued by maintenance issues. Pakistan is lobbying India to get some diesel locomotives. So even if BART is willing to import, it would take some doing to get India to export any.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They don't need to rip up the track to replace with standard width tracks. They just need to add a third rail. Easy.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
A thyristor is a commonly available device and I am guessing it is used for motor control. If they had gone with more traditional technology back in 1972 what would they have used ? Tubes, a rheostat? I would have thought that replacement of a high power vacuum tube or something more electro-mechanical would cost way more than the modern equivalent of a 1970s era thyristor.
BART is not a museum heirloom, they can feel free to use less expensive modern components if they wish, it's not as if Thyristors have all of a sudden become unobtainable exotic vintage tehnology.
The writers just picked thyristor because they were betting few people would have heard of them and it would sound more like the designer had been unreasonable where in fact the opposite is true. This just sounds like a bunch of whining to me, $100,000 for thyristors spread out over 430,000 passengers/day would be paid for in 1 day if a quarter had been set aside out of each fare
Nullius in verba
Why not install a 4th rail at the correct gauge opposite the 3rd rail side and once all the tracks are upgraded, plunk new trains on it? I guess it wouldn't work everywhere like where there is a change in which side is electrified, but would it not be a solid start that would cover most of the track?
3D printers have made any notions of "obsolete" or "unique" a thing of the past! Need a 40 year old thyristor? Download the datasheet and 3D print as many as you need! Need a new rail car? Same idea!
Right?
I guess I don't understand how 40 year old systems cannot be upgraded with more modern control systems that do not rely on obsolete or difficult to produce parts. Need motor controllers? There are lots of modern alternatives that run cooler and provide more power.
I also find it hard to believe the computer systems used in BART couldn't be replaced with modern industrial systems - I would think a proper "black box" spec could result in a modern replacement that costs a fraction of even the yearly maintenance costs of the current system and is more reliable.
I'm reminded of Electromotive's efforts to replace the aging and VERY PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE control systems Rockwell thought they had them locked into back in the mid-90s. EDS (yeah, those guys) delivered a system that was cost-effective and a considerable upgrade to Rockwell's ICE systems. It was cheaper to completely replace a system than it was to replace components to keep the old system running. ...but that's probably just crazy talk.
And arrived 5 minutes to an interview because of a breakdown >:(
Good thing I was planning on getting there 30 minutes early!
Coming from the UK we had this same issue more than a century ago between the 4' 8.5" (Stevenson 'what was in the colliery, seemed like a good idea') Standard Gage and the GWR 7 foot (Brunel 'Scientifically researched with the help of Charles Babbage') gage.
In the end, even though accident statistics (no GWR train ever rolled over), fuel efficiency per passenger per mile and other criteria decreed the 7 foot gage superior, the government ruled that since there was more Stevenson gage track in existence that the Brunel gage would be phased out and replaced with the new Standard gage.
I have to say that if they had gone the other way the world would be a far better place, because the wider gage would have allowed much higher speeds at an earlier epoch while affording much grater loads without the need of technology to avoid the risks of rollover. Saying that, the Bart system was an ambitious but eventually fruitless move.
"Right now BART needs 100 thyristors at a total cost of $100,000.". Why not invite few students from China to investigate the marvel of San Fransico, and in about year buy the parts needed from aliexpress for about $10,000?
The BART system was supposed to be complemented by:
- 1983: moving side walks
- 1992: flying bus system
- 2004: hovercraft ferry system to Oakland
- 2007: multi-tier golden gate bridge
- 2012: removal of seats in the BART, due to androids to provide a telepresence for office workers
- 2014: nuclear Armageddon with the USSR.
- 2048: using tracks as vegetable planters
- 2131: track system used to build wall to deter Canadian hordes from British Columbia
If only the teacher unions would show interest in working in well maintained schools.
My uncle (Willard Matthews) was one of the design engineers during construction of the BART system. This is a completely non-BART related anecdote, but as a young man I spent the day the US landed on the moon (July 16, 1969) at my uncle's house in Oakland, California, and we were mesmerized watching the moon landing. It seemed such a magical event. For folks who weren't fortunate to watch that, one of the great uncertainties was whether the astronauts would simply disappear under countless feet of regolith fluff. They didn't, but it was a great unknown until they actually landed. He was very proud of his work on BART, and remained with the system as an engineer for his entire life.
Our district had the opposite problem. The school board tried year after year to set aside money for future maintenance and upgrades and got largely replaced by the 'Concerned Citizens' (sort of a local Tea-Party-inspired group) who managed to replace the board with people who wanted to squeeze every dime out the budget. Ergo, no money set aside for anything, schools falling apart, sports and extra-curriculars slashed, accreditation in jeopardy.
Unfortunately if a government entity tries to 'set aside' money for anything, it gets viewed by some as 'waste' and an unnecessary tax burden.
To the surprise of no one - the $70 million bond request by the school district was voted down by a 3 to 1 measure.
Which will provide the answer, in ten years, as to how they ended up with a 70 year-old system...
The schools just choose to have many administrators vs. properly maintained facilities.
They cannot have both, which is what they are trying to have.
What cannot go on forever, will not - eventually administrative overhead will be forcible reduced so that buildings can be maintained.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I suspect BART is also the victim of failing to plan for the future. Entropy always wins. No system exists that will not need maintenance or repair in the future. It is foolish to defer maintenance and upgrades and shows a lack of stewardship by the managers of that system.
To the surprise of no one - the $70 million bond request by the school district was voted down by a 3 to 1 measure.
Worse, they've been spending billions on expanding the system while deferring maintenance to make their finances look better, and now they need (well want) to pass a $3B bond measure to pay for all of the maintenance they haven't been paying.
It will be interesting to see what the voters decide.
There's a similar problem on the US East Coast in New Jersey called
"The Lindenwold High Speed Line", designed around the same time.
Only difference is the rail gauge is standard, but duct-tape and bubble-gum
are what's holding it together.
CAP === 'votive' - really, doesn't /. realize kids use this site. Revolting!
If it takes 22 weeks to obtain replacement thyristors (or any given part) and you haven't stockpiled enough thyristors to cover the expected failures that will occur over the next 22 weeks (plus some for the unexpected failures), you have a management problem. If parts are becoming unobtainable and you haven't identified a suitable replacement part (or re-engineered the system that uses that part), you have a management problem. If the costs to keep adequate spares or perform retrofit work exceed your budget, you have a management problem. None of these issues are technical in nature, they are all signs of the people responsible for keeping the system running at the business level (management) not doing their jobs.
Sure you could get something standard and buy the cheapest mass produced cars available. Or you can do your own thing and depending how you do the bidding process create more local jobs to support your beast of a system. Take a look at Boston. The state legislature gave the contract to replace all of the cars on the T to a Chinese firm with the requirement they need to be built in Mass. They could have bought the cars cheaper elsewhere, but now you have a brand new car factory being built and ~500 jobs created with the hope that this factory will start producing cars for more than just Boston. All I'm saying is the world is ungodly complex and the decisions that are made are seldom singly influenced.
5 foot six is common in India. Anyway, that only determines the length of the axles and the sleepers, nothing much else. There are bazillions of gauges in use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I seldom hear about the maintenance issues of the trans-bay tube.
A catastrophic failure of the trans-bay tube would certainly shut the system down for years.
Anyone knowledgeable about how that clever bit of engineering is maintained?
-S
Sometimes the road more frequently traveled is, in fact, the better road.
I run into this all the time. My company manufactures a wire harness product that uses several connectors which is used on an OEM auto that sells in large volumes. The engineers could have designed in pre-existing, widely available and standard connectors available from numerous sources for reasonable amounts of money. Instead they decided to custom design some new connectors for the application despite the fact that they provide zero extra functional benefit, cost substantially more, have 4 month lead times for delivery, have to be ordered in 50,000 piece quantities and can be purchased from precisely one source. Whichever engineer came up with this idiocy probably added their entire salary over the lifetime of the product in unnecessary cost to this product. (We sell about 250,000/year at around $4 each so it would be easy to get $100,000 in cost per year out of this product with a more sensible design)
The wiring harness industry is awash with countless different unnecessary designs of terminals, connectors and other hardware than never should have been seen the light of day. I have a bookshelf 10 feet from me as I type this that has probably 120 thick catalogs that are full of redundant, unnecessary or non-standard hardware. Maybe 5% of those designs are actually necessary and the rest are nothing but waste.
My basic take is that while there is nothing wrong with going bespoke in principle, you need to have a VERY good reason to deviate from standards or to use unusual designs, even if those standards aren't totally optimized for your application. Engineers who don't understand or ignore this principle are essentially engaging in a form of malpractice.
It is easier for the tax vigilantes to push through a referendum on the basis of the district collecting taxes they clearly don't need because they are not spending the money. If they push against payments on debt-financed capital expenditures, then it is the tax vigilantes that have to justify defaulting on debt to the public.
I was around when BART was first built. The DC Metro system is identical to BART. At the time, the only difference was that DC chose not to use the "streamlined" nose feature, because it was not actually needed for aerodynamics, only for PR, and it prevented using the nose cars in the middle of the train.
Let's see... Those 60s and 70s aerospace engineers were obviously morons. That's why they were able send some folks to the moon, a feat no one has replicated since, and no one even knows how to build the Saturn rockets any more.
The problem with BART is gross mismanagement by flunkies who spent all their money on featherbedding, PR, and stupid expensive projects, while ignoring maintenance. If you need any proof, try to figure out how to use a BART ticket machine.
If BART had competent engineers, they would not be at a loss to understand the cause of voltage spikes.
During one of the trips a person on the tour asked our tour guide "The boilers didn't become 60 years old overnight - why didn't the school board put some money away every year for future maintenance and upgrades?"
I don't know about your state, but in California the state government puts limits on how much money the schools can save. In some cases that is why you see schools with budget problems buying laptops for every kid.....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
BART employees are part of CALPers system. Basically, if you work 5 years and are 50 years old you can retire, now changed to 52 (https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/employers/benefit-programs/retirement-benefits). This is better, than Greece.
Nice achievement, retirement at 52, while the rest of the country on SS are considering whether to raise SS retirement age from 67 years (to those who are born after 1960). Social Security is not even considered as a pension plan. There is some litigation going on, but that is a super deal.
There are stories about $1000 thyristors. Since this is public money, nobody, I mean, nobody has a vested interest to negotiate a price, or look for alternatives. It is the opposite: most of the transportation authorities are covered with a tight knit of supply companies that make a living of it. No surprise, supply companies are private.
There was a story about LIRR (long island Rail Roads), where 95% of the retirees claimed disability (with the 98% approval rate). The story has disappeared from NYTimes for a while. I wonder how many disabilities are claimed by BART?
Waste, Fraud and Abuse: is what characterizes government run entities.
Their maintenance gets shorted whenever some politico's budget doesn't have enough money for self-promotion(i.e. new construction to look good for the voting public)on the premise that 'I won't be here when it falls apart anyway, so...' See: Flint, MI
They need that many thyristors because there was a voltage spike that was killing them.
Rather than fix the voltage spike on that one small section, they took other cars from other areas of the system, and replaced the cards with the blown thyristors.
Which the unfixed voltage spike then killed up as well.
Rather than bus-bridge the impacted section, and actually figure out what the heck was going on with that small section that was making it cook thyristors in the cars, they ... you guessed it! Threw *MORE* cars at the problem, and cooked even *MORE* of them.
Either someone is grossly incompetent, or someone really wants the taxpayers to buy them new toys, and they are perfectly willing to set fire to the old toys they no longer want in order to temper-tantrum their way into the new toys.
Meanwhile: quit being assholes and throwing more of your dwindling supply of cars at that section of track!
---
Moral of this story...
Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do 'this'!!!"
Doctor: "Then don't do that."
Local car dealers constantly work with city officials behind the scenes to make public transit fail.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Actual engineers use standardized components exactly because they are easy to get and replace and their characteristics are well-known. The morons designing BART though they were so much better than everybody, they ended up much, much worse. There are countless cities, many in Europe, that have working, fast, reliable public transportation, with equipment often spanning half a century or more in age-difference. The trick is to go with standards and to decidedly not believe the rules of solid engineering do not apply to you.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Maybe there is something for IT people to learn here?
When you go with proprietary, you are vendor locked.
We have national standards for school buses, and many tour buses and intercity buses and large vehicles like box trucks are all standardized to a large extent and the same anywhere you go.
Many cities source transit buses from only a few manufacturers but every city has to have their custom version of train. Why? Regular railroads manage just fine with extremely compatible rolling stock across every railroad and even across the Canada and Mexico borders.
And yet we have all these transit systems sourcing heavy rail cars from all the heck over. I cannot believe there is so much need to have a custom rail car for every system. Sure, have a short version for some places and a longer car for others, and perhaps some differences in the operating cab. But the rest of the cars should be standardized and things like motors, power pick-ups, couplers, seating, ventilation, and so forth, should be as common as possible. And then, source the same design from multiple makers. Trust me, the railcar manufacturers certainly can copy designs and reproduce them without any issue.
There should also be common signaling, power delivery, and control systems. None of this stuff NEEDS to be custom in every city.
So now you have common system parts all across the US. You gain immense engineering knowledge as expertise on one system would transfer to others. Big breakdowns would be reduced or eliminated, and under worst-case scenarios, systems could borrow rail cars from each other to meet demand urgencies or other needs. This happens quite often on freight railroads. It's not even notable.
Sig for hire.
OK, sorry, as titles go that was definitely a bit click-bait-ey.. But here's what I mean... BART was paid for [I'm guessing] with public finding, i.e. taxpayer dollars. That means that it should have a reasonable expectation of long service life, maintain-ability and competitive tendering. I'm not familiar with the procurement process for BART, but the OP details a lot of aspects of the design [for example the rail gauge] which are sufficiently non-standard as to make the project unattractive to competitive tendering. That, right there, should have been an alarm bell for those who green-lit the funding. California is am immensely wealthy state, so here's hoping that they can find the funding to keep BART running smoothly for another 40 years... But as a society I think we need to be taking some lessons from this sort of experience. The most important one is: when the money being spent comes from tax dollars, open systems based on industry standards and design principles must be mandated. The designers of BART would have been unlikely to have opted for left-hand-thread Whitworth nuts and bolts... see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... if you're curious ... so why should we accept technology implementations that are similarly bespoke? There's never any shortage of an Administration [of most Western nations] willing to vote themselves new powers, but they don't seem quite so keen on holding themselves to account on things like Standards. Here's hoping that stories like this one will serve as educational reminders!
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.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Not only they have not put aside some of the money, but they also have chosen to use accounting standards, that are not practical and not transparent when asset management is involved.
Any decent home ownership association, will accrue some money for the roof repairs or other capital expenses starting from the first year of the existence.
Public entities really do not see difference between the concepts of revenue, income and surplus.
> "The boilers didn't become 60 years old overnight"
untrue! one day they were a spry 59 years and 364 days. the next day, 60 years?! who could have seen that coming?
I get that being expensive means things cost more, but is it really all that big of a problem? Montreal's metro system is way more custom than BART, is nearly a decade older, and handles three times as many daily passengers on a system roughly a third as big, and upgrading/replacing stuff hasn't been presented like some sort of impossible task. Yeah, it means that when you buy new cars, they need to be custom designed. So... you hire a company to design them.
It all comes down to dollars. When someone else (i.e. taxpayers) is footing the bill, normal economics like operating, maintenance and replacement costs aren't part of the equation. Run it into the ground and go back for more (of someone else's) money to move on the "The Next Big Thing" (tm).
Not surprisingly, the Bay Area author cannot see that the real problem is big government incompetence. The track gauge of the system should not matter, nor should most of the other issues, if competent operators tracked issues and kept spares in stack, ordering new parts in advance. If you are a government operating a system designed and built in the seventies, you should exercise a few brain cells and realize that if you need a new part X, on average 1 time per year and you know that you occasionally have an emergency that requires 4 of them.... AND you know there is a 24 month lead-time to get more then you can rapidly figure out how many ought to be in your stock room at any given moment and you ought to easily be able to plan your buys. You also ought to be able to NEGOTIATE a deal every decade or so with one of those whizz-bang soooper high-tech computery companies in, um THE BAY AREA, to design build and replace the ancient control circuits with modern ones and at a bargain price.
One of the big problems we have in California is that we have imported so many Hispanics into the state so fast and with Democrats pandering to them, that they have not become very politically diverse (by design) and the state has thus been converted into a one-party-rule place. The problem is NOT that they are Hispanic, but rather that a particular ethnic group has been imported en mass rapidly with no time for assimilation and diversification (i.e. Americans of Irish or German or Swedish or Italian heritage are NOT politically monolithic, but this recent very large Hispanic surge is). The state workers' unions are in near total control of the state government (they are the biggest source of cash and workers in every CA political cycle) and the state (at all levels) therefore is always managing government activities in way to pacify those unions. The result is that nearly all state funding gets siphoned to fund very generous pensions and infrastructure gets horribly neglected. The voters pass props to fund the schools, or bridges and the schools and bridges crumble and the money goes into the pensions. The has recently happened in San Diego where there are firefighters who were never injured on the job but have retired on $500K+ per year pensions while all the money from a recent bond to upgrade schools is missing and the schools got no improvement (and now ANOTHER bond is an the ballot to fix the schools).
The entire BART issue is one of government failure, corruption, and bureaucratic inertia. Rather than facing this, the left-leaning folks of the Bay Area now apparently thing the problem is that the designers of the system introduced progress??? There's nothing sacred about any particular train gauge or any particular bit of electronics etc. If one diagnoses the BART problem as an attempt to do something new and better then the obvious (and wrong) solution is to become Luddites and always choose old low tech solutions - "Stop Progress!" becomes the rally cry. This is backwardness for the sake of protecting government incompetence.
An obvious question, but if half way through saving for a replacement school it had turned up that the school had $35 million in savings for maintenance, repair, and/or replacement, how do you think that same person who have felt? How would you feel? Any chance there'd be calls to spend that money more on new text books, new laptops, etc?
Honestly, this is more or less precisely the reason why there's basically no (absolute no?) States that have an effective surplus--some magic accounting that really calls for hire taxes to pay back a loan, not counting. Whether the school actually needed that $70 million or not, there's almost certainly no way they could have actually saved that sort of money for years and gotten to the point of replacement without someone finding out about and raiding it, be it administrators in the school to someone in the local government to someone in the state government to the voters themselves demanding replacements for "wasting" all that money even before it's spent.
But, yea, whatever.
PS - It really sounds like the problem with BART is they need to spend the money to redesign and modernize the components list for their trains/rails/etc. That costs a good deal of money, implies a long-term proposal of investment, and honestly it'll cost a good deal of money in higher fares and taxes. To all the people already complaining about the lowballing, which was likely done in part by members of every interested party but undoubtedly someone was actually giving good estimates which were ignored by the same people complaining now, this just further justifies waiting and presuming that it's all just a hoax to get more funds. This is also the reason why people wait until they have to go to the Emergency Room because they waited until it was too late.
The Democrats who run California get most of their money from CA gov't employee unions - and then they sit across the table from the reps of those unions to negotiate contracts. As a result, CA gov't workers have some of the most generous benefits in the US including one of the most evil and corrupt benefits ever: "air time". Some of the unionized workers can go to their bosses and hand over a couple thousand dollars to buy "air time" which is an adjustment in their employment history record that changes the number of years they are shown to have worked. This means they will get higher retirement benefit checks every month for every year of their retirement based on the idea that they worked for the state longer than they actually did. It's one of the highest returns on investment anybody in the nation can get - right up there with Hillary Clinton's infamous stock futures investment.
Using "air time" a number of California gov't employees have been found to have worked a number of years in one agency, then bought "air time" to get up to something like 20 years, then changed to another job in another agency and worked a few years and bought "air time" and then retired on TWO full-sized pensions. Doing this means that the taxpayer pays for four or five policemen or firefighters and only gets one on duty and two in retirement who are drawing the pensions of four. It's total corruption and a total rip-off of the non-gov't worker taxpayer.
n/t
This happens in private industry, too, in fact the railroad industry. Canadian Pacific big wig Hunter Harrison improves the balance sheet of CP by deferring maintenance and selling off rail lines, but once the pain hits in the future he will likely have already cashed out and dumped the problem onto his successor.
He has a history of this behavior which is why Norfolk Southern rebuffed his few merger attempts in recent months. NS knows how to run a railroad and those in the know are quite certain that Harrison would decimate the NS system the same way he has CP if he gains control of NS.
So there are 2 object lessons in how to run a railroad: the good way and the bad way. the funding sources of BART and Metro can take their pick on which way to go.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
MongoDB is WebScale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
All the SV talent is busy making apps to get eyes on ads. Nothing else matters. They're letting BART rot so they can build social/political support for autonomous cars.
https://www.nasw.org/users/nba...
The Bay Area Rapid Transit system pushed transportation technology to the limit, in the 1970s. Trains didn't have conductors; they ran automatically, like self-service elevators.
Unfortunately BART also pushed technology beyond the limit. A robot car came into the Freemont station at the end of the line, didn't stop, and kept going--through the station and into the parking lot. The lawsuits over this and other problems came to about $250 million.
Lets put some information out there about CALPers. You make it sound as if everyone starts there and stays 5 years and retires. The average CalPERS retiree worked for 19.93 years. By dividing the average annual pension for a CalPERS participant in 2012, $30,456, by the average years of service, 19.93. The result, $1,528, is the amount the average CalPERS retiree accrued in annual pension benefits for each year they worked during their careers. I am not saying that this isnt generous by today's horrible standard of retirement planning for the middle class, but neither is it "better than Greece" with people abusing the system. As for government run entities, "there have been many empirical studies examining the efficiency of government bureaucracies versus business in a variety of areas, including refuse collection, electrical utilities, public transportation, water supply systems, and hospital administration. The findings have been mixed. Some studies of electric utilities have found that publicly owned ones were more efficient and charged lower prices than privately owned utilities. Several other studies found the opposite, and yet others found no significant differences. Studies of other services produced similar kinds of mixed results. Charles Goodsell is a professor of Public Administration and Public Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who has spent much of his life studying bureaucracy. After examining these efficiency studies, he concluded: “In short, there is much evidence that is ambivalent. The assumption that business always does better than government is not upheld. When you add up all these study results, the basis for the mantra that business is always better evaporates.”
This. If the schools put money away every year, sooner or later some politician will notice they have money in the bank and will cut their budget. It will be cut not just enough to eliminate the "surplus" that they were putting away, but so much that they then have to spend what was already saved just to keep running. When that is gone, they will have a terrible time getting their budget expanded again.
They don't need to rip up the track to replace with standard width tracks. They just need to add a third rail. Easy.
The BART cars have third-rail contact paddles on each side, this so the (mostly) single third rail can be on either side, so to get the smaller gauge cars properly centered would require two additional rails.
There are areas where government is somewhat better than private business. For example, defense. Or enforcement of the contracts. Or border control. Nobody is getting into the argument about very basic functions of the government.
Now your CALPERS example is a further evidence of a too generous reimbursement. It is worth mentioning, that BART employees also get social security payments? Using your example: if you work for BART five years, you can get an extra 636 dollars per month in pension (in addition to Social Security). In comparison, many of the private companies no longer accrue and offer defined benefit. As such, BART is generous, very generous, in relative terms.
Rather than lecturing the audience about differences between private and public services, let's take your argument from the other side: are you stating that BART is efficiently and properly run service? Who runs it? How is your comment relevant to the discussion?
Joe Joe made it go
Bart Bart cut a fart
And blew the damn thing all apart
Just mount a third load-bearing rail 9.5" inside of one of the existing rails, and you can run standard-gauge cars, and standard-gauge wheelsets, etc. on the same track as their odd-ball cars.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
When you take the train from Barcelona into France, there is an extended stop at the old Spanish border village of Portbou. For half an hour track engineers will scurry back and forth from one car to the other, rattling and banging away to change each whelset from the Spanish 5 ft 6 inch gauge to the international standard gauge to the train can proceed into France.There must have been a worldwide standards tussle between the 5' 6" and 4' 8.5" gauge at one time. Spain and San Francisco lost.
Maybe that's why no one employs me as a train designer.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Governments are not supposed to sit on large amounts of cash. For large capital expenses they borrow the money (bond measures) so that the people getting the benefits of the expense are the ones paying for it. Otherwise you have today's people paying extra for something they may never get the benefit of, which is not very easy to sell.
The US landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. I'm not sure what you are referring to.
Since it's wider than the standard, I suppose it might be possible to switch gauges.
How can they have any sort of issues with that kind of traffic? Just save $1 per fare, and they have $3M in a week. The $100k for new controller hardware is tiny in comparison. Heck they could probably buy several new carriages per week if they organised their finances properly. Enough to probably replace all the rolling stock in less than 5 years.
If only they had more than one building. So they could DO maintenance without having fat accounts.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
During one of the trips a person on the tour asked our tour guide "The boilers didn't become 60 years old overnight - why didn't the school board put some money away every year for future maintenance and upgrades?"
You can't "put away money" in public departments. Someone will look at the books, and the school system's "extra money for future improvements" fund is someone else's proof that the system gets more money than it needs, and that money is then taken and given to a different department.
The only way to keep funding is to SPEND it. When cutting costs in one year means you get far less money in the next year, maybe not enough to make real ends meet, or to survive an unexpected shortfall, you start learning how to not cut costs.
Fiscal responsibility is punished which is why every department in government is a money pit.
Do you really think that school districts should not have infrastructure upgrades? For gods sake, public school budgets in this country are absolutely pathetic. Teachers get paid crap. Because of that the quality of the education is, in general, subpar, and we're turning into Idiocracy. While I agree that in general public infrastructure programs should build in safeguards and savings to upgrade aging systems, I don't feel that its likely that any of these organizations, be it BART or school districts are recklessly squandering money and living lavish lifestyles at the expense of the taxpayers. I'm sure there's they're own share of bureaucratic waste and inefficiency, but at the end of the day if we, as a society want to have nice things, we need to pay for them. the more socialist parts of the EU pay higher taxes than us, but for it they have excellent infrastructure, better social and income equality, and a generally higher quality of life. The American I've got mine and screw everyone else attitude isn't a sound way to run a society.
How's that supposed to work? Even if they have 60 buildings in need of a boiler every 60 years, they won't likely have built them in 1 year increments.
I ride BART several times a week, and completely agree its current state is parlous. However a few factoids (some dredged up from memory as they pre-date the modern internet):
1) Indian Gauge: I have heard the motivation was primarily stability in the event of a major earthquake occurring during e.g. rush hour
2) antiquated controller system: at least one attempt was made to upgrade it, during the 80's. One of the companies was a software contractor Logica (sp?). It was a classic large-systems cluster: over budget, late, never worked, subsequent litigation. I believe the original system used Westinghouse computers and at one time the number of trains during peak hours was limited by RAM exhaustion (measured in KB IIRC, might have still been magnetic core that far back)
3) the current problems have surfaced in part because they waited too long to replace the fleet; new cars not showing up until 2017 and they really were needed a year or two ago.
4) Aside from lack of maintenance (very real), a good argument can be made CapEx has been misdirected. Some alternatives to going south of Fremont that would have been more useful: removing SPOF at Oakland Wye; going out Geary (allegedly the busiest transit corridor in USA without rail); crossing the bay roughly where Dumbarton Bridge is. Alas the funding model for BART (and various intra- and inter-county rivalries) make all these political non-starters.
5) could be worse... consider any sprawly sunbelt city.
Is there anything special about the voltage, current or signalling on those cables that would make them Bad to plug in wrong?
The connectors are keyed so that is impossible. There have been "off the shelf" equivalent connectors available for decades (no exaggeration) that would provide identical functionality at lower cost and a substantially simplified supply chain. This part is installed at the factory and is never seen by an end customer unless they tear apart the entire rear door of the vehicle.
It's actually even worse than I described. The terminals are manufactured in northern Michigan and then shipped to California before being shipped back to us in Southeast Michigan. Instead of drop shipping them directly to us they waste and extra two weeks and substantial freight costs shipping these terminals thousands of unnecessary miles. One of the connector manufacturers also grossly over-packages the connectors. They wrap them in foam and plastic wrap and put 400 in a box when they could easily fit 3000 in the same box if they didn't bother with the foam. The connectors are plastic and nearly indestructible so they spend 5X the freight cost shipping unnecessary boxes. We just pass these costs along but it would be trivial to pull 20-30% out of the cost of this part if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to get engineering to redesign the damn thing. (OEM engineers HATE to touch something once the PPAP has been completed)
Part of the reason it ended up being a custom connector is the financial incentives of the connector manufacturers and engineers. I won't bore you with the details but rest assured that it plays a big role in why they designed a custom connector when it was totally unnecessary and counter productive. There are some conflict of interest issues, engineers who don't understand how to manage costs effectively, lazy OEMs who don't understand the products well enough, etc.
Big auto manufacturers routinely step over a dollar to pick up a nickel. My company is engaged in a series of meetings right now for a low volume part. (something like 3000 units annually estimated) The OEM is insisting on a series of weekly meetings with 10 people in attendence. The hourly wage costs of these meetings is something like $4000 each and the product we are going to sell MIGHT sell for $40 each. There is absolutely no way that the OEM will not take a financial bath on this. The meeting costs alone will be more than the revenue from the parts. The funny thing is that they will demand 3% price reductions per year for the next 3-5 years and what will happen is the suppliers will jack up the price to absorb the price reductions up front. They would have much better results if they simply bothered to collaborate with their suppliers closely.
That whole article an interesting piece of speculative fiction. The real reason is most likely the lack of spending on maintenence and someone is trying to deflect the blame elsewhere. For instance given the reliance of the business on thyristors it would make sense to keep a supply on hand, rather than having to order one in each time a train breaks down. It's also curious that the article compares BART to a 747 aircraft as they hadn't yet come into service.
An illegal and secret cartel of Firestone, Standard Oil and Ford bought many street car systems and shut them down.
Short and sweet, most streetcar lines in the states were all but bankrupt before World War 1.
It cost about a penny a mile to keep a Model T Ford on the road. Portal to portal with wife, kids, dog and cargo, at a time when a streetcar ticket cost 5 cents.
The move to the suburbs began to look a lot more practical. The streetcar in heavy traffic or bad weather not safe or easy to board, particularly for a woman, dressed as most were in those days. The electric starter put a lot of women behind the wheel.
You can route a bus over anything that vaguely resembles a road. You don't have to build tracks or overheads.
it is not a flaw, it is a marketing design. You make something non standard, so that once you hooked the customer, it is difficult for him to leave you at a moment notice. If the connector are standard then your only way to compete can sometime be price, which may not be in favor. but if you got a special connector, it will be less a hassle to renew, than to refactor productions lines for a new one.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Sounds incredibly successful to me, then.
BTW, I take it a couple of times a year when I go into SF (to avoid paying for parking, plus my main car is an electric that won't make it both ways without charging), whereas I'd never consider taking a bus that distance.
from a book: Ecoscience. Erhlich, Erhlich, and Holdren 1977 p866
One of the greeat difficulties with conversion from auto. to public
transportation has been the tendency to seek flashy, expensive "spaceage"
solutions to Amercias's transport problems. In case after case, aerospace
companies and contractors have promoted such technological circuses and
in several instances they have aucceeded in having them produced. The
crowning blunder may be BART... That system is a double tragedy-- not only
has it not accomplhsed what it set out to do, but it has tended to give
new ventures in mass transit a undeservedly bad reputation. BART cost a
fortune to build and has proven inordinately expensive to run. Since its
delayed opening, it has been constantly plagued with malfunctions. Perhaps
most discouraging, despite carrying full loads in rush hours, BART has
not appreciably diminished auto traffic in the Bay Area.
p867
In 1957, ... electric trains of the exisiting Key System joined SF with
cities on the other side of the bay. The Key System used part of the
lower deck of the Bay Bridge and consisted of 5 lines with 55.9 miles of
track. Because of declining patronage in the 1950s, the system was said
to be losing $350,000 annually and in need of $4.5 million to renovate
its tracks. In 1958 the Key System was closed down.
In 1962 voters ... after a propagand campaign financed in large part
by contractors and others, hoping to profit from the building of BART,
voted a $793 million bond issue for its construction. The system was to
provide fast, convenient commuting to SF and relieve the glut of autos
that was choking the city and befouling the air in an area once renowned
for its beauty. A first blow was dealt to those aims when counties both
north and south of the ciry voted not to join the system which was then
constructed with 25 of it 34 stations in the East Bay where only 17
percent of the commuters who worked in SF lived....
In late 1974 BART was finally in "full" service -- well behind schedule
and at a cost of $1.6 billion rather than the programed $1 billion. It
thus cost 350 times as much to build as would have cost to repair the Key
System (230 times , if corrected for inflation). In 1975 it was losing
about $20 million per year, or 60 times as much as the Key System. But
even at that cost, service was far from satisfactory. THe space-age design
featured, amoong other things, streamlined cars and fully computerized
controls for what was described by promoters as a "modern 'supported
duorail' system" (English translation: train on train track).
In a surpassing bit of folly, the "supported durorails" were not made
standard gauge, so standard railroad cars cannot be run on them and
the system cannot be hooked into existing rail lines. [ plus American
train industry is cut out of easy competition with fhe Frence builders]
The flashy looking BART trains have slanted cars... cars can only be
removed from or added to the center of the train... [ since changed. ]
The ultimate fiasco., however, was the fail-safe automatic train-control ...
system designed by Westinghouse (which also builds "fail-safe" nuclear
power reactors) so that human opertors would be unneccessary. [ since
changed ] Trains roared past stations; doors opened between stations
and refused to open at stations, phantom trains were "detected" and real
trains were lost by computers, each time causing the whole system to grind
to halt; trains ran at erratic speeds. Choas ruled. For months a train
was not allowed to leave a station until notified by a BAET employee
over the telephone from th next station that it was safe to proceed,
Eventually a traditionally designed signal system had to be installed
at addditonal cost.
BAET appeared to be the wrong system in the wrong place-- hugely
expensive and not designed to serve th
it is not a flaw, it is a marketing design.
Not in this case it isn't. In many cases you would be correct but not here.
You make something non standard, so that once you hooked the customer, it is difficult for him to leave you at a moment notice.
Often that is true but not in this situation. It would be annoying but the OEM in this case could force a connector change tomorrow (figuratively speaking) if they wanted to go to the trouble. It's basically a monopsony. The OEM can dictate what goes into the vehicle and it would have been trivial for them to specify off the shelf connectors even if they abdicated design responsibility. In fact there is almost no upside whatsoever for the OEM to use a custom connector in this particular case. Even the connection interfaces are USCAR standard.
Back in the 1970s they were not alarmists so they didn't think San Francisco would end up so badly run that the transit system would not be upgraded for 45 years or more, so it wasn't designed to last for that long.
It's quite pathetic that people are complaining about it needing some work now.
I can see in my catalogue a 1.4kV 700A thyristors costing ca $50-$80 a piece.
I wonder what specs do they need.
Many things in this describe why China is eating our lunch.
China has nothing to do with the problems I described. The problems I describe exist with all the large auto OEMs and they a structural problems of big companies, not competitive ones. It's one of the problems with developing very large complex products. In a product with 10,000+ parts it is more than a little challenging to carefully monitor all of them. It can be done but it isn't easy. The Japanese probably do it the best but the Americans and Europeans aren't far behind. China's auto makers on the other hand have a long way to go to catch up.
They are running things in manufacturing the way we used to before trust fund babies and MBAs added arbitrary busywork and office politics but lost sight of the supply chain.
I have news for you. US manufacturing is incredibly strong and much better than it was 30+ years ago. US manufacturing has never been more efficient and the US manufacturing sector is huge - over $3 Trillion annually. The reason some of the work is headed to places like China is simple - labor costs. Any work with a high labor content is going to naturally go where labor is cheap. It has always been that way and always will be. China is not better at manufacturing than the US. China simply has a very large supply of cheap labor which they have done a good job of mobilizing. They're developing into a modern economy but since they are 20% of the world's population it's only surprising that they have taken this long to get there. When China has 5 people for each 1 in the US you should expect them to be an economic power.
I have no idea what your pointless dig is about. You think "trust fund babies" run the auto companies? 'Fraid not. Even the Ford family lets outsiders run the day to day operations of the company. And your dig at people with MBAs is equally misplaced. None of the problems I described were caused by anyone except engineers and purchasing agents (who very rarely have MBA degrees). You apparently think people with MBA degrees are some sort of boogie man causing all our problems. It's not true and such scapegoating serves no useful purpose.
Lots of systems were initially designed with suboptimal/superseded technology, and over time, adjustments got made. In Spain, for example, they simply abandoned the old gauge and went with standard gauge when building new high speed lines so they could connect outside the country. The problem with BART is its governance structure: an independent government agency that competes with other transit agencies in the same geographical space, and has no particular incentive to serve the greatest need. An example is in san bruno, where the BART tracks go directly underneath the Caltrain station. San Bruno is the last BART stop between SF and the SF Airport, so it would be a perfect place for a connection between the two systems. But BART chose to build its San Bruno station over a mile away, to serve the Tanforan Mall, and to forego a connection with Caltrain there. I think the reason is BART realized if you could get off BART at San Bruno from SFO, you could take an express train to downtown SF, and BART would lose business (although it would be great for passengers, of course). So the result was the terrible triangle of BART's San Bruno, SFO, and Millbrae stations. Instead of giving both SFO and Millbrae bound train passengers the option to change at San Bruno, which would have served riders much better, they built it as an either/or, so that Caltrain-bound BART passengers had to take a Millbrae train. After a few months, they "realized" that the connector between Millbrae and SFO was not economically viable, so they started forcing transfers from Millbrae Caltrain and buses to take BART to San Bruno and then change trains to backtrack to SFO, for most of the day. Before the BART extension, going from Millbrae station to SFO used to be a free, quick, and reliable shuttle ride. They turned it into such a time-wasting mess that it is a disincentive to ride Caltrain. But of course that suits BART just fine, because they can't make money dedicating trains to shuttling passengers from Millbrae to SFO, but they can make money by being a monopoly provider of train access between SFO and SF. If the two systems were governed by a single agency, I think they would make rational decisions like connecting BART and Millbrae at San Bruno. It is BART's priorities, not just its tracks, that are misaligned with other systems.
Are you able to explain the rationale behind this policy? I'd like to learn about it but I'm not sure what to search for.
Are you able to explain the rationale behind this policy?
No, I don't understand it and it makes no sense to me (the most likely reason is because the state has no money, and was looking to cut budgets everywhere, and that is how they did it).
I learned this by talking to school board members, so I don't have a web link.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
With the "necessity" of custom parts, the track gauge et al., how many SF city council members were stock investors and board members of the companies that supply the parts then, and how many today.
Having a all-custom system makes sense when the city "leaders" are "on the kick-back gravy-train".
Lived in DC back in the '90s. Metro then looked like a "custom-made" disaster too. Wonder how many on the DC council have a hand (money) in the "Safety Response" services? Back in the day, DC was "Nairobi on the Potomac".
Ha ha
"Some trains" and "few places" does not disagree with more than before.
The comment was about it being uncommon and in only a "few places".
why is is a reason for BART being over 40 to be obsolete, whereas the Tube with over 100 years of operation is doing really well.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
I have no actual knowledge of how BART is managed. My comments were more focused towards your assertion that, "Waste, Fraud and Abuse: is what characterizes government run entities." As noted, this is not always the case and I wold argue that even beyond your concessions of defense, border control, etc.
The average CalPERS retiree worked for 19.93 years. By dividing the average annual pension for a CalPERS participant in 2012, $30,456, by the average years of service, 19.93. The result, $1,528, is the amount the average CalPERS retiree accrued in annual pension benefits for each year they worked during their careers.
Just for reference, this adds up to retirement benefits worth about $11,000 per year over the 20-year employment period.
Initial balance required for a 20-year annuity (from ages 50 to 70) paying out $30,456 per year at 5% (real) expected return: $368,000.
Annual investment needed at 5% (real) return over the 20-year work period to have $368,000 at retirement: $11,000.
Of course, if one did only work five years before retiring at 50, all else being equal, the equivalent annual investment needed to earn that $30k pension would be closer to $66,500. That's a significant difference in benefits, biased against the more senior employees.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Progressives! Solving the worlds REAL problems. *
No space age technologies that never took off; just tried and true but old as dirt rail technology.
Yes - there's a host of funding issues (pensions? big-dig debt?) - and management of the commuter rail has transitioned to a private firm (cause that'll make it work better). But what I find so utterly fascinating is the shape that even recently renovated portions of the system are in.
South Station commuter rail platforms were rebuilt not all that long ago and already they are crumbling. Concrete chipping and crumbling and pitting. Metal plates peeling up, corroding and rusted. WTF?
Seems to be the same all over the USA when it comes to public transit. Travels abroad paint a very different picture.
It's because we don't budget for infrastructure. That is all.
Methinks thou doest not know the meaning of 'infinitesimal'.
I went to a school that was built in 1930 and is still in excellent condition. A little overbuilt to start with and good maintenance throughout its life worked wonders.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Sorry, but BART's railway gauge is not "exlusive to BART" or even "introduced by BART." Indian gauge is the second most common in the world after standard gauge.
India itself is converting most of its railways to use 5' 6" gauge that weren't already.
It's hardly "exlusive to BART" or even "introduced by BART" as the author claims.
Fact check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Kriston
This sounds a great deal to me like "middlemen making money" by ensuring that everything is routed through them at least once, need it or not.
You'd think so but actually not. It's genuinely just the distributor and manufacturer being penny-wise pound-foolish. We originally dealt directly with the manufacturer of these parts but even though we buy a lot of terminals and connectors (over 250,000 connectors and 1.5M terminals per year on one product) we're actually not a big enough customer for the manufacturer to want to deal directly with us. (We spend about $150,000-200,000/year with them and you need to be over a million to go direct with companies like TE or Yazaki on OEM stuff) So the manufacturer decided we would have to go through a distributor of their choosing. Not entirely unreasonable because the distributors are better set up to deal with smaller accounts. But there is only one distributor for these parts and it is partly owned by the manufacturer so it's not a classic middle man mark up sort of thing. The manufacturer is actually giving up margin by not dealing direct with us but they feel the reduction in complexity is worth it. (I disagree as you may have guessed)
The problem is that it's logistically easier for the distributor to have everything shipped to the distributor and then ship it where it ultimately goes themselves. It's less complex, particularly for the billing. Setting up the infrastructure and billing systems to do drop shipments on this sort of scale is a non-trivial undertaking. But it's not like it's a weird problem nobody has ever solved. Drop shipping has been done for a long time and it's not impossibly hard. The companies and purchasing agents are trading off cost to reduce complexity and unfortunately they are doing a crap job of it.
They probably went many years without failures, and these are not constant wearing devices with a fixed failure rate. The problem came when they got 2000 volt surges in their 1000 volt lines, something that they apparently haven't figured out yet.
How does that constitute a major failing? By virtue of its excellence in other respects?
I've never run into this issue, and if I did, my take would be that I was spending too much time at bars...
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Same way it works for every other institution with a physical plant. You do maintenance every year, carry insurance and occasionally take a loan for a capital cost (suppliers understand and almost always have a financial partner).
Schools are not middle schoolers that have to save their allowance for bit ticket items. They have credit ratings like big boys.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That depends on the political situation. Too often, they are treated exactly like middle schoolers and aren't allowed to take out a loan or save money from year to year.