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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."
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)
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,
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
That might buy you a couple of thyristors. Not enough to make a difference.
What this all boils down to is the age old problem of money being available for construction, not maintenance or improvement. Follow up costs are ALWAYS lowballed. At least in the military sector, they explicitly cost out spares and upgrades (or at least cost out some of it). In civilian government it's always the shiney. Once it's running, no more ribbon cutting ceremonies.
To be fair to the BART designers though, If I designed something that lasted twice a long as specced and carried four times the passenger load, I'd be pretty happy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
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.
I can play the same game: "I'm from Enron, Comcast, SCO, Oracle, and Microsoft, and I am here to help."
Gov't and private industry are BOTH economic tools. If you don't regularly inspect, monitor, and keep them clean; they can rust, corrode, fail, and even put an eye out.
Table-ized A.I.
And while you're stuck in a massive traffic jam because everybody else took your advice, you can smile smugly that you avoided the taint of communism.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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."
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!
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Moral of this story...
Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do 'this'!!!"
Doctor: "Then don't do that."