I don't know the last time the entire BART system got shut down. There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages.
No information as to the actual cause right now. Easy to speculate that it's a cyberattack, but I'm going to go for the free square and wildly guess it is a DNS issue.
Best wishes and godspeed to the folks who are working on fixing the issue, whatever it is.
throwup238 · 6h ago
My free square is one of their control computers’ parallel ports frying out and now they’re unable to find a replacement because they buy them all as old stock off of ebay [1].
The ports are used as hard realtime GPIO so if some of the electrical isolation failed downstream, it could take out the motherboard. Back before Vista’s security model change, drivers could fill DMA buffers to the parallel ports controller and get hard realtime time outputs on Windows so there’s a quite lot of old industrial control systems running on a thread.
Wow that takes me back. My graduate physics experiment ran on two MS-DOS computers with Turbo Pascal programs exercising the parallel ports. Each machine had a grotesque board that I made, with multiple ADC and DAC channels. I finished in 1993. By that time, of course, everything was obsolete, but I wasn't going to delay my project by upgrading.
mrguyorama · 5h ago
Forgive my arrogance, but nothing presented in that article should be such a big blocker. Spare parts for the traction gear sure, but none of the computing "problems" make any sense.
It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably.
This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
jkingsman · 2h ago
I'd wager it is technically a "cheaper" problem, but I'd also consider the axis that this is public transit, an industry known for being neglected budget-wise. Reverse engineering/reimplementation with competent parties may be laughably out of budget.
gouggoug · 46m ago
> There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages.
Loud explosions happen all the time in SF. Particularly in the Lower Nob Hill / Tenderloin area.
I lived an Lower Nob Hill for many years and heard countless explosions, most often in the middle of the night (2am-4am) or early hours (6am). Often times these explosions M80s-M1000s being dropped and detonated.
Someone was arrested back in 2019 and the explosions reduced dramatically.
I thought I heard that explosion and then just attributed it to a dream. Thanks for confirming
AStonesThrow · 7h ago
> wildly guess it is a DNS issue
Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular.
Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.
dmoy · 6h ago
Sorry I will ruin the mystique:
It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.
scarmig · 6h ago
Oh, that just updates the AAAA record for the Waymo. Totally harmless.
ToucanLoucan · 6h ago
Do Not Slide. So just hit that if you lose traction, or if you're having a hard time getting your kid out of the park.
jeffbee · 6h ago
I don't see any reason other than sheer speculation to suspect a cyberattack. It can just as easily have been some car crashed into a fiber optic thingy.
The last time in recent memory there was a large BART disruption it had been caused by a motorcyclist who somehow flung himself over a fence into the trackway and died. That stopped service in and north of Oakland, which is more than half of the system by riders.
scarmig · 6h ago
All sheer speculation--the reference to cyberattack was from a now dead comment suggesting it was ransomware.
It doesn't seem likely to be a physical obstruction on the tracks, though, as the entire system is down and trains aren't running anywhere. I don't know if that's happened before.
fhkatari · 7h ago
I used to live in Oakland, and am really sad to see continued failures of BART. They had started significant expansions right before the pandemic, allowing a long (but no traffic) ride possible from Oakland to San Jose.
A key challenge for BART is that they depend a lot more on ticket sales than subsidies, and as a result, have been hit much harder with lower ridership.
jerlam · 5h ago
As an occasional BART rider, the changes they've made since the pandemic have been in the right direction. I'm mostly indifferent to the new trains and payment cards, but they've increased the frequency so that missing a train doesn't mean you can be waiting for over 30 minutes, which can be longer than your entire trip.
The main problem which BART cannot fix is that the trains usually don't go to where you want to go.
sagarm · 1h ago
BART can fix that by building dense mixed use -- office, commercial, and residential -- around their stops.
jyounker · 30m ago
BART can't do that. The cities can do that.
somanyphotons · 45s ago
I think that's part of the problem, bart stations should be the centerpiece of a really dense (micro)neighbourhood
schoen · 1h ago
> They had started significant expansions right before the pandemic, allowing a long (but no traffic) ride possible from Oakland to San Jose.
They're still working on this, with four more stations planned beyond Berryessa (Little Portugal, Downtown San José, Diridon, and Santa Clara), plus an additional infill station on the Berryessa line. I think that would be really cool. Unfortunately it looks like this new extension won't be that competitive with Caltrain as a way to get to San Jose from San Francisco. Maybe at non-express times.
Also, it looks like it won't be complete until 2040!?
pj_mukh · 12m ago
Otherwise known as the Worst Transit Project in the US [1]
i mean yeah if you’re in SF caltrain is super convenient, so its fine. Getting from oakland to south bay without a car was hell though. This line would make it so much better.
Plus: Oakland is actually building homes for people while SF remains laughably behind on building quotas.
xlbuttplug2 · 6h ago
> sad to see continued failures of BART
I think this is overstated, at least from an operations point of view. My mom has been using BART to commute to work for over a year and I can't recall many incidents like this.
maldev · 44m ago
I don't see how it ever comes back. You used to have business people and engineers riding the train. But with Covid the enforcement policies got really bad and the trains and atmosphere are so trashy now. It's far easier for the aforementioned group to just hire an Uber than deal with the crime and trashiness that's plaguing the system now.
kpennell · 33m ago
I ride the system all the time and I don't think it's trashy. Also there are the new gates all over that block people from jumping in as easily and that has been cut down quite a bit. I think it's tough for Bart to probably come back still because people don't need to be in downtown SF as much as they used to because a lot of people work from home now, but yeah I just don't think it's fair to say that the system is some trashy system. I think it's mostly pretty nice.
yawnxyz · 6h ago
ever since I paid $8 for jumping in and out of a BART station b/c I meant to go into a Muni station... I lost all respect for them.
Lammy · 1h ago
Fun fact: the reason it's like that is because both levels were envisioned for BART usage before the Peninsula lines got cut. In the original design both levels would have been the same fare area and you would have been able to walk between them instead of having to take the big escalators down to BART caged off from the Muni level. It's comical to watch one of the Muni trains crawl to one end of the giant platform that was sized for 10-car BART trains.
kelnos · 31m ago
Ah, I've always wondered why the Muni platforms (especially Powell) are so ridiculously long compared to the Muni trains themselves. Makes so much sense that they were originally designed for BART cars.
Johnny555 · 5h ago
This is pretty common among transit agencies, I got on the wrong platform in Japan once and couldn't get back out until I talked to a station agent, the fare gate gave an error and wouldn't open the gates. Not sure if that's better or worse behavior than charging a fare.
It's called an "excursion fare", which is meant for those that just ride the train without getting off and come back to the same station. You can talk to a BART station agent (assuming you can find one) and they'll let you out, or call customer service and they'll reverse the charge.
Modern fare systems should be able to figure out when you've exited right after entering and not charge you. BART is supposed to be adding a 30 minute grace period so if you go in and out of the station within 30 minutes, you won't be charged.
Heh, I was in Japan a few weeks ago, and had left my bag in a locker at a station (inside the fare gates). I went back to get it later in the day (when I could check into my hotel), and the station attendant charged me 150 yen just to go in to get it and come right back out!
I get that they want to charge people who ride the trains for... fun?... and then get off at the same station, but it felt really silly.
xlbuttplug2 · 6h ago
I too learned that the hard way when dropping a family member off. I naively assumed it wouldn't charge me if I tapped out at the same station 10 minutes later.
ta1243 · 6h ago
London Underground has nice clear policies around this, both about what you'll be charged
I always have high levels of respect for companies with such clarity
crote · 5h ago
In The Netherlands you get a full refund if you tap out at the same station within 20 minutes. If you travel with NS (National Railways), you even have 60 minutes to tap out.
Having someone pay just to wave off someone is incredibly customer-hostile. Besides, how many people are even committing fraud like that?
You can talk with the clerk to get a refund. But I thought they were doing away with it entirely…
impute · 1h ago
You can also call them and get it refunded after the fact
andbberger · 1h ago
BART's doing great. good headways, same schedule all day everyday. name another american transit agency doing a takt
dyauspitr · 1h ago
It’s not frequent though.
ryanmcbride · 7h ago
I'd say the BART administrators overpaying themselves is the bigger moneysink. Not to mention the spending 73M dollars to overhaul the gates to stop fare evaders, when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
darth_avocado · 7h ago
The problem is that the Bay Area needs a single transit agency. All the agencies fighting each other for funding doesn’t help. It’s a much easier task to levy a minuscule tax on the entire region that pays for free public transit. If BART wants to do that at the moment, they can’t.
trollbridge · 7h ago
I live in an area with a county-wide transit sales tax, and it just seems to result in them running a lot of empty buses around and building (and eventually abandoning) transit centres. Full price is $1.50 (which if paying cash means fiddling around with coins) except for the 50+ mile express routes which are $2.50.
darth_avocado · 6h ago
Well you could be in the Bay Area where you’d have 27 agencies, that still run a lot of empty routes and build useless and expensive transit centers, and then charge way more than what you have.
jeffbee · 7h ago
The MTC is that organization for the Bay Area.
darth_avocado · 6h ago
Bay Area has 27 transit agencies and MTC has limited control over them beyond dictating how the state funds are allocated. Thats not what I’m talking about. What I’m suggesting is that the 27 agencies be one agency operationally and get funded as such. You’ll have much better outcomes.
jeffbee · 6h ago
MTC is not just concerned with allocating state funds, though. They administer RM2 and RM3 and the AB1107 sales tax, and they put on a trench coat to act at BATA collecting and using bridge tolls.
darth_avocado · 6h ago
But unless MTC is concerned with the operations, you cannot have decent outcomes. If BART has an over reliance on fare but MUNI doesn’t, a single agency would be better able to balance the budget. Similarly if one agency is spending more of the state funding on creating new routes while other is spending more on creating more frequent service on existing routes, MTC won’t be able to direct what needs to happen. If BART is running more often, but the bus I take to the BART station just cut service, I’m not taking BART anymore.
Point of a single agency is not just to collect taxes. It is to make sure there are better outcomes, so that when you do need more taxes to fund public transit, you don’t get the pushback from the public.
jeffbee · 3h ago
I guess I just don't believe in your thesis that larger scale leads to better outcomes. Wouldn't we just end up with Caltrans Lite Edition, spending all the money on car junk? BART already has this problem, with two elected directors who are more likely the chew off their own legs than to ever ride BART.
jedberg · 5h ago
> when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
There was a study done on this. It turns out that the median income of someone riding under the Bay Bridge in BART is higher than someone driving a car across it.
In other words the wealthier people are using BART. So if you made it free, you'd be subsidizing the wealthy.
darth_avocado · 1h ago
That’s a very wrong conclusion to draw from the study. If median income of someone riding the bart is higher than someone driving, it could also mean that they drive because it is cheaper to do so. If you make it free, they would probably ride BART too, making it more accessible and equitable.
jedberg · 1h ago
The study was more in depth than that. It found that BART goes to more places that wealthy people go (financial district, SOMA, etc) than where poorer people need to go.
SllX · 7h ago
> when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
Absolutely not.
scarmig · 7h ago
I think there should be options for low income residents to ride for free or heavily discounted rates (which exists now). But it's all about implementation: simply letting anyone jump on turns the system into a madhouse. Making sure everyone pays (even if through a government issued pass) and works with the system helps balance equity considerations with maintaining safety and cleanliness.
Why not? Could you not make a pretty strong argument that avoided negative externalities (CO2 and air pollution from car engines and tires) make public transport worthwhile by itself, and just fund transport by taxing those (gas/cars)?
Saves you all the infrastructure for billing/access control and some enforcement, too.
SllX · 6h ago
1) it’s a funding source for transit agencies which are already facing shortfalls and at the mercy of voters for any tax increases or bonds.
2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
If you live in a region of the world that doesn’t have these issues, great, do what you want. We’re talking about the Bay Area specifically, and the thing keeping BART ridership down is that people don’t want to ride BART because it sucks. The actual service is mostly fine. The issue lies in the people.
I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay. In the years prior to the new fare gates being installed, I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
ProfessorLayton · 1h ago
>we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it ...
Public transit fares should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket fares. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.
>I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay.
Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.
Living in a car-centric world is a major source of spiraling costs of housing for everyone in the region. Many of BART's train stations are surrounded and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage which is ridiculous.
nartho · 1h ago
>2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.
> I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
darth_avocado · 1h ago
Contrary to the popular belief, more ridership makes it more safe and less dangerous. Pretending that a fee excludes the less desirable is laughable. Plenty of people that you describe, ride the trains even now, they just don’t pay the fee. By adding the fee you’re mostly excluding the people who would ride it if it were free: law abiding people who work hard to provide for their families, but can’t afford the fee.
And as for funding shortfall, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You don’t fund transit, the agency needs to make cuts, making it less reliable, less safe and reducing capacity. Once that happens, even fewer people ride transit, creating even more funding deficits. This also increases the unwillingness of people to fund transit.
We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
marcinzm · 6h ago
Because capitalistic incentives work. More riders = more money => incentive to get more riders. More riders = more cost/hassle => incentive to have fewer riders.
edoceo · 6h ago
Why is free public transport bad? Could get even more folk out of their cars, or expand employment opportunities.
darth_avocado · 1h ago
Because people in America have being taught to think that way. Plenty of countries run free (or near free) public transit just fine.
Spooky23 · 1h ago
Because people are people. You won’t be able to get on the train to commute when people are sleeping there.
People don’t value free things, and it’s hard to plan things without pricing demand.
ianburrell · 5h ago
The price is not the barrier for most people using transit. The service reliability and availability is more important. Would you rather pay fare for frequent bus or wait around for free fares?
bethekidyouwant · 6h ago
Because the tube will be filled with the unwashed masses
SllX · 6h ago
I answered more thoroughly in response to your sibling comment.
omnimus · 6h ago
Because socialism.
tekno45 · 7h ago
bart doesn't get to decide its free.
satiated_grue · 5h ago
Not quite but nearly totally unrelated, but I love that Debian ships a package of a PDP-8 PAL-like cross-assembler written at BART:
> Due to a computer networking problem BART service is suspended system wide until further notice. Seek alternate means of transportation.
That's worth a screenshot.
Any idea whether the political and technical will is there, to post-mortem this, and make the system more robust and resilient?
a_t48 · 5h ago
Once the initial shock of “how the hell do I get to work” wore off, it was nice taking the ferry and F to SOMA. Took an extra 20 minutes, but better than the time it would have taken waiting in bridge traffic.
CoffeeOnWrite · 7h ago
I’m worried about BART. The new gate tap scanners work so poorly, somebody really screwed those up, and they haven’t publicly explained what went wrong. I don’t understand why the media doesn’t cover this apparent bad screw up. There were a number of articles on the selection of the design and the planned rollout and the demonstrated susceptibility to ongoing fare evasion, but silence on the adverse impact on paying passengers.
Every day the last week at my station there are piles of commuters held up by the semi-broken scanners. Kudos to the front line staff down there apologizing. I am not holding my breath it’ll be fixed anytime soon.
kaladin-jasnah · 7h ago
It's interesting this is such a large problem there. In NYC, the tap-to-pay OMNY system is literally excellent. I swear it processes cards in a second or less and you save a lot of time by not buying a MetroCard. Are the BART scanners for some sort of RFID/NFC cards that are local to the train system, or do they accept credit/debit card payment? I'm curious how OMNY is so fast (compared to even going to a store and paying with tap to pay) and why BART is slow.
plorkyeran · 5h ago
The Clipper cards used by BART are 90s technology that took so long to fully deploy that it was outdated by the time most people started using it. There was a brief window where if you were an early adopter it was better than what was available in many places (or not-so-brief compared to OMNY, which came along a decade later), but unsurprisingly the things designed later have mostly improved on it.
The killer feature that also causes most of the quirks is that it can be used to make payments fully offline without allowing double-spending of balance. This is of course mostly a killer feature for transit operators rather than users. OMNY solves the same problem by just accepting that it'll occasionally permit free rides.
trollbridge · 6h ago
And OMNY will either accept a tap to pay credit card, a phone with tap to pay (including Apple's express card option, where it works even if your phone is dead), or a prepaid value dedicated OMNY card.
It does not actually run the transaction through the entire way - if a transaction fails, the card info gets placed on a blacklist and that particular NFC device won't receive an instant authorisation next time. Generally speaking, people don't have an easy way to generate lots and lots of fake NFC devices, so this hasn't been a problem for widespread fraud (vs just jumping over the turnstile).
beezlebroxxxxxx · 6h ago
I don't know if this is the case with BART, but I've seen in my own local public transit network an incredible inability or lack of will to use systems proven in other areas. Instead of going with quick, proven, and reliable, systems, they'll default to going for the cheap option, which is usually slow, re-inventing the wheel, and unreliable. I visit a city like NYC or London or Tokyo and see a transit system with decades of accrued understanding, technical experience, and optimization. Then I come home and ride something shiny but slow, janky, and bug ridden.
0_____0 · 6h ago
It works so well that I was severely confused the first time I used them, coming from the Bay Area. I spent ages trying to figure out how to instantiate and load a transit card into Google Wallet before realizing I could just tap any card I had.
abeppu · 7h ago
Yesterday I went through Glen Park Bart, and every one of the scanners had a taped-on hand-written note in sharpie that said "hold 4 seconds".
I doubt that the taller gates will ever pay for themselves (I thought in general fare-enforcement costs meaningfully more than systems lose in evaded fares), but I definitely don't understand why we needed to "update" gates with scanners that are clearly worse.
scarmig · 7h ago
The gates are less about direct fare recovery and more about limiting the externalities that gate jumpers impose on other passengers. BART is definitely calmer and cleaner than it was a year ago.
joshuamorton · 1h ago
> (I thought in general fare-enforcement costs meaningfully more than systems lose in evaded fares)
This is generally true for active fare enforcement, since you have to pay employees to do enforcement, there's appeals processes, and some people just don't pay the fine.
If the new faregates result in some more people (lets say 1%!) paying for trips (less freeriding), that's directly 1-2 million per year. If they also increase real-ridership, that's additional income. To make the cost back quickly you do need a significant increase (10-15%), that's not totally out of the question, though it's probably not only due to faregates.
jeffbee · 7h ago
The point of the new scanners is you can pay to ride with any payment instrument, not just a Clipper card.
BART isn't the only agency suffering from those new readers. The problem is the vendor, Cubic. They supply this junk to many agencies.
a_t48 · 5h ago
IIRC it’s the same sensors as the old ones
CoffeeOnWrite · 5h ago
I have no idea and didn’t comment on what the sensors are. Before the new gates, they worked. Now they only half work.
whalesalad · 6h ago
I lived in DC for a few years before I moved to SF, spending a few years there as well. DC Metro is not perfect by any means, but I was really surprised at how much better transit was in the district than the bay area considering they have zero weather issues to contend with and are - ahem - home to a tremendous amount of technological talent.
My personal observations are really that California are just truly fucking terrible at this sort of thing. Ironic considering they are such a huge economy and so wealthy. In northern California PCH (pacific coast highway) has been closed for over 15 months due to a rockslide. In southern california, a huge segment of ACH (angeles crest highway, one of my favorite places on earth) has been closed since 2023! You cannot drive from one end of the range to the other at this time.
China would have fixed these issues in weeks. For all the cash and people they have, Cali really manages to drop the ball on these things constantly. Don't even get me started on high speed rail that was built out in the middle of buttfuck farmland from Madera to Shafter. Like a stairway to nowhere.
throwaway81523 · 5h ago
Some system wouldn't power up this morning. System is back in service now, with major delays in all directions.
Due to human failure when operating computer systems*
talldatethrow · 1h ago
Most people I know wouldn't take Bart if it was free.
Dirty, noisy, and unsafe.
I can't imagine anything can be done to make Americans take trains at scale unless atleast the unsafe part is handled, and then the dirty part atleast.
noitpmeder · 4h ago
Their HQ lost power yesterday, maybe related?
ashayh · 6h ago
"Poorer" countries with a per-capita GDP that's 1/5th of Bay Area have exceptional public transport.
How about fix the country public transport first instead of spending 2 Trillion on BS AI?
sershe · 4h ago
Very poor countries also have exceptional public water wells where people can draw water with buckets.
That is because those are inconvenient, slow but necessary amenities in the areas where most people are poor. And that is why US currently doesn't need either.
Source: lived in a poor country with exceptional public transit and didn't ever drive till 29; and carried water with buckets from a well only a block away for an aggregate of 1-2 years.
Tactician_mark · 1h ago
But rich cities can also have great public transit. New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Singapore... in fact rich cities with transit as awful as the Bay Area seem to be the exception, not the rule
estebank · 2h ago
Equating having access to public transport with lack of running water is wild to me. A rich country is not one where poor people drive but rather one where rich people take public transport.
timewizard · 1h ago
> A rich country is not one where poor people drive but rather one where rich people take public transport.
You've mixed a subjective measure "rich country" with an objective one "rich people." I can't think of any situation where people of greater means accept more limitations.
Anyways do you have any examples of "rich countries" that have solved this problem?
danans · 1h ago
> Anyways do you have any examples of "rich countries" that have solved this problem?
Rich countries that have good public transit? Sure, that's easy.
Denmark
Singapore
Japan
Germany
Switzerland
France
UK
...
Here are some middle income countries that have good public transit also:
China
Spain
Portugal
Italy
Taiwan
sershe · 2h ago
I'm not doing that. I am equating on a spectrum not being able to, as a society, afford running water infrastructure to not being able to afford cars and infrastructure.
Note that this includes environmental arguments - saying that 8bil people cannot all live like people in Houston may be true but it's basically saying we cannot afford to have nice things.
But the thing is US, and especially major cities, currently can afford them!
Why would "rich people take public transit"? Except for extremely dense areas, driving is faster especially accounting for overhead; goes exactly where one needs, any time; and is way more comfortable. Only those who prefer extremely dense areas and also cannot live close to work/amenities (kind of the point of density) would want it.
quickthrowman · 6h ago
Right now I am a subcontractor on a project to replace the Liebert unit in the server room that runs my metro area’s transit system, my worst nightmare is my tech calling and telling me the servers are down, glad this isn’t me!!
quotemstr · 6h ago
Did they finally run out of old new stock 5.25-inch floppy disks?
more_corn · 6h ago
That was my guess.
whalesalad · 6h ago
it's always DNS
gjvc · 5h ago
I would like to find the person who started this stupid meme and shake them by the neck.
The majority of times it's SSL.
Spooky23 · 1h ago
The network guys ducked up again.
whalesalad · 5h ago
to some extent SSL depends on DNS lol
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 6h ago
I took a trip to Europe last month and watching America fail at all manners of transportation is embarrassing
dang · 2h ago
Ok, but please don't post flamebait, including nationalistic flamebait, to HN threads. It just leads to flamewar hell.
Trust me it’s embarrassing for a lot of us that have traveled to countries with decent rail travel. Part of it is the shamelessness of the car industry for lobbying for decades to shackle everyone to a car. Now the car is an engrained part of American culture and makes our cities much more ugly, isolating, loud, and dangerous than they need be.
pb7 · 5h ago
You must not travel very often then. European public transit is extremely unreliable due to strikes. I, as a tourist, have been screwed over countless times having to pay $150 to take an Uber to an airport that is nowhere near the city it's meant to service. It's so unreliable that in some cities the brand new trains have displays that show which lines are currently having strikes. Now that's embarrassing.
testfrequency · 5h ago
You can just say Germany
TulliusCicero · 6h ago
Hey, at least we're ahead in self-driving cars!
But yes, public transit in the states is rather pathetic.
breakingcups · 6h ago
They can even go through specially bored tunnels! Oh wait...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bart-shut-down-t... (https://archive.ph/LnvJ1)
https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/09/bart-service-shuts-down-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/bart-train-shutdown.ht... (https://web.archive.org/web/20250509152319/https://www.nytim...)
https://abc7news.com/post/systemwide-bart-shutdown-due-train...
No information as to the actual cause right now. Easy to speculate that it's a cyberattack, but I'm going to go for the free square and wildly guess it is a DNS issue.
Best wishes and godspeed to the folks who are working on fixing the issue, whatever it is.
The ports are used as hard realtime GPIO so if some of the electrical isolation failed downstream, it could take out the motherboard. Back before Vista’s security model change, drivers could fill DMA buffers to the parallel ports controller and get hard realtime time outputs on Windows so there’s a quite lot of old industrial control systems running on a thread.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-...
It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably.
This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
Loud explosions happen all the time in SF. Particularly in the Lower Nob Hill / Tenderloin area.
I lived an Lower Nob Hill for many years and heard countless explosions, most often in the middle of the night (2am-4am) or early hours (6am). Often times these explosions M80s-M1000s being dropped and detonated.
Someone was arrested back in 2019 and the explosions reduced dramatically.
This article[0] goes into detail about it.
[0]: https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythica...
Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular.
Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.
It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.
The last time in recent memory there was a large BART disruption it had been caused by a motorcyclist who somehow flung himself over a fence into the trackway and died. That stopped service in and north of Oakland, which is more than half of the system by riders.
It doesn't seem likely to be a physical obstruction on the tracks, though, as the entire system is down and trains aren't running anywhere. I don't know if that's happened before.
The main problem which BART cannot fix is that the trains usually don't go to where you want to go.
They're still working on this, with four more stations planned beyond Berryessa (Little Portugal, Downtown San José, Diridon, and Santa Clara), plus an additional infill station on the Berryessa line. I think that would be really cool. Unfortunately it looks like this new extension won't be that competitive with Caltrain as a way to get to San Jose from San Francisco. Maybe at non-express times.
Also, it looks like it won't be complete until 2040!?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZrrtF8Iy8k
Plus: Oakland is actually building homes for people while SF remains laughably behind on building quotas.
I think this is overstated, at least from an operations point of view. My mom has been using BART to commute to work for over a year and I can't recall many incidents like this.
It's called an "excursion fare", which is meant for those that just ride the train without getting off and come back to the same station. You can talk to a BART station agent (assuming you can find one) and they'll let you out, or call customer service and they'll reverse the charge.
Modern fare systems should be able to figure out when you've exited right after entering and not charge you. BART is supposed to be adding a 30 minute grace period so if you go in and out of the station within 30 minutes, you won't be charged.
https://www.bart.gov/guide/faq#3
I get that they want to charge people who ride the trains for... fun?... and then get off at the same station, but it felt really silly.
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
And about refunds (typically you'd get an automatic refund for a one-off event)
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/touched-in...
I always have high levels of respect for companies with such clarity
Having someone pay just to wave off someone is incredibly customer-hostile. Besides, how many people are even committing fraud like that?
Point of a single agency is not just to collect taxes. It is to make sure there are better outcomes, so that when you do need more taxes to fund public transit, you don’t get the pushback from the public.
There was a study done on this. It turns out that the median income of someone riding under the Bay Bridge in BART is higher than someone driving a car across it.
In other words the wealthier people are using BART. So if you made it free, you'd be subsidizing the wealthy.
Absolutely not.
Discounts are fine. Free riding isn’t.
Why not? Could you not make a pretty strong argument that avoided negative externalities (CO2 and air pollution from car engines and tires) make public transport worthwhile by itself, and just fund transport by taxing those (gas/cars)?
Saves you all the infrastructure for billing/access control and some enforcement, too.
2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
If you live in a region of the world that doesn’t have these issues, great, do what you want. We’re talking about the Bay Area specifically, and the thing keeping BART ridership down is that people don’t want to ride BART because it sucks. The actual service is mostly fine. The issue lies in the people.
I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay. In the years prior to the new fare gates being installed, I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
Public transit fares should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket fares. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.
>I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay.
Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.
Living in a car-centric world is a major source of spiraling costs of housing for everyone in the region. Many of BART's train stations are surrounded and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage which is ridiculous.
These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.
> I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
And as for funding shortfall, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You don’t fund transit, the agency needs to make cuts, making it less reliable, less safe and reducing capacity. Once that happens, even fewer people ride transit, creating even more funding deficits. This also increases the unwillingness of people to fund transit.
We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
People don’t value free things, and it’s hard to plan things without pricing demand.
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/palbart
http://www.pdp8online.com/ftp/software/palbart/
That's worth a screenshot.
Any idea whether the political and technical will is there, to post-mortem this, and make the system more robust and resilient?
Every day the last week at my station there are piles of commuters held up by the semi-broken scanners. Kudos to the front line staff down there apologizing. I am not holding my breath it’ll be fixed anytime soon.
The killer feature that also causes most of the quirks is that it can be used to make payments fully offline without allowing double-spending of balance. This is of course mostly a killer feature for transit operators rather than users. OMNY solves the same problem by just accepting that it'll occasionally permit free rides.
It does not actually run the transaction through the entire way - if a transaction fails, the card info gets placed on a blacklist and that particular NFC device won't receive an instant authorisation next time. Generally speaking, people don't have an easy way to generate lots and lots of fake NFC devices, so this hasn't been a problem for widespread fraud (vs just jumping over the turnstile).
This is generally true for active fare enforcement, since you have to pay employees to do enforcement, there's appeals processes, and some people just don't pay the fine.
If the new faregates result in some more people (lets say 1%!) paying for trips (less freeriding), that's directly 1-2 million per year. If they also increase real-ridership, that's additional income. To make the cost back quickly you do need a significant increase (10-15%), that's not totally out of the question, though it's probably not only due to faregates.
My personal observations are really that California are just truly fucking terrible at this sort of thing. Ironic considering they are such a huge economy and so wealthy. In northern California PCH (pacific coast highway) has been closed for over 15 months due to a rockslide. In southern california, a huge segment of ACH (angeles crest highway, one of my favorite places on earth) has been closed since 2023! You cannot drive from one end of the range to the other at this time.
China would have fixed these issues in weeks. For all the cash and people they have, Cali really manages to drop the ball on these things constantly. Don't even get me started on high speed rail that was built out in the middle of buttfuck farmland from Madera to Shafter. Like a stairway to nowhere.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/no-bart-trains-runnin...
How about fix the country public transport first instead of spending 2 Trillion on BS AI?
That is because those are inconvenient, slow but necessary amenities in the areas where most people are poor. And that is why US currently doesn't need either.
Source: lived in a poor country with exceptional public transit and didn't ever drive till 29; and carried water with buckets from a well only a block away for an aggregate of 1-2 years.
You've mixed a subjective measure "rich country" with an objective one "rich people." I can't think of any situation where people of greater means accept more limitations.
Anyways do you have any examples of "rich countries" that have solved this problem?
Rich countries that have good public transit? Sure, that's easy.
Denmark Singapore Japan Germany Switzerland France UK ...
Here are some middle income countries that have good public transit also:
China Spain Portugal Italy Taiwan
Note that this includes environmental arguments - saying that 8bil people cannot all live like people in Houston may be true but it's basically saying we cannot afford to have nice things.
But the thing is US, and especially major cities, currently can afford them!
Why would "rich people take public transit"? Except for extremely dense areas, driving is faster especially accounting for overhead; goes exactly where one needs, any time; and is way more comfortable. Only those who prefer extremely dense areas and also cannot live close to work/amenities (kind of the point of density) would want it.
The majority of times it's SSL.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But yes, public transit in the states is rather pathetic.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806281