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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)
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
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.
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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.
On the other hand, ride quality goes a long way towards inducing people to ride. Poor ride quality, means fewer people, and only those people who have no other alternative, which makes on-going funding and maintenance difficult. At the time the system was new, I'm certain that making sure there was enough ridership to support the system was of high concern.
Of course, with the reported current ridership, it looks like they did a fine job. Now, if they had properly estimated the ongoing maintenance and operation costs, they should be running with a tidy profit for maintenance and retrofit.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
And your point?
The only thing that they really messed up was the track gauge, not using the standard gauge but a more or less unique for the BART system.
When it comes to electronics it's not impossible to replace. I don't see a $1000 price of a thyristor as something remarkable if it's a high power type.
What's more amazing is that in many cases processors designed in the 70's are still manufactured today while processor designs from the early 90's are almost unobtanium now. Just look for Z80 processors (a 70's design) at Mouser and then look for 386, 486 or 68040 processors. You can find the latter but only at more obscure vendors and sometimes they are refurbished from scrapped computers. With that as background I'd rather try to fix a computer board from '72 than one from '92 if I have the schematics. A '72 computer is either wired or hole-mounted 0.10" split DIL chips on a PCB with maybe 2 or at worst 4 layers. A '92 computer board is way tougher and requires patience since some chips aren't just surface-mount soldered but glued as well on a PCB with multiple layers.
If you want to make a system that is going to have a long lifespan, then you have to design it with a lot of standardized interfaces using connectors that are extremely common and that are easy to manufacture. And when you do that also make sure you document the interface very well, since that allows people in the future to manufacture plug-in replacement modules using modern hardware. The overall design will be more expensive but the concept lifespan will be a lot longer.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"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.
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
It's difficult to even define standard interfaces that make sense 50 years in the future. But you have a good point - modular hardware is a lot easier to upgrade than complete systems. I work on a telescope that was originally built in 1965, so I get to replace bits and pieces of it with new stuff now and then. However, sometimes all I have to do is correct a little design mistake from way back when to get it running in tip-top form.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
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.
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
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.
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."
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!
Asking that question today doesn't tell us much, because the answer is now obvious: "no, it's very expensive". Instead, let's ask "Back in 1968, when BART was being designed, what were the expected benefits of using a non-standard gauge track?" Maybe it allowed the designers to consider higher speed curves, or better platform designs.
Maybe the rail vendor was trying to create a new standard for mass transit rail systems, and gave them a discount for using an over-sized gauge. Maybe the vendor was completely sleazy, and was trying to create a vendor-lock-in system where only they would be able to sell spare parts. Maybe the politicians of the day were corrupt and took kickbacks to look the other way?
Regardless, there were probably a bunch of engineers shouting "don't buy non-standard gauge rolling stock!", and BART happened anyway.
John
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.
If there had been tax dollars, it would've happened 30 years ago.
The original design for BART was to form a circle around the San Francisco Bay Area. But the residents of San Mateo County declined to have BART go through their neighborhoods, citing quality of life issues. So the BART circle never got built. Building the BART extension to the South Bay 30 years later requires significantly more tax dollars than originally estimated.
Also, that will be part of a bank of similar units which also have to have pretty similar characteristics or one will take all the load, and guess what? Bang!
So if you can't get or manufacture an exact replacement you'd have to replace the entire drive module.
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."
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
Keep in mind that the current system is beyond it's design lifetime AND it's design capacity. The decisions made at the beginning might have been the correct ones given conditions then.
Naaaa, that would be, I don't know, smart? The US does not do "smart" in public transportation, that would be Socialism!
Just look at the number of idiots here defending the stupid decisions BART made back then and you see what I mean.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
The expected benefit was not blowing off the golden gate bridge. The BART was supposed to go to Marin. That is why the gauge is broad. It made good engineering sense based on the design requirements. Then Marin pulled out.
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.
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.
Have you ever read the history of road design in the little ditty; what horse's ass designed this road?
Having different gauges in Europe and Russia was a good idea so neither Germany nor Russia could easily invade each other.
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.