If you're looking to get between Oakland and Alameda and San Francisco on that day and avoid this and other events, I rather enjoy and can recommend the Ferry. It's slower and more expensive but also more pleasant. Go without hurry and bring a book if you don't want to stare out at the water.
The ferry is the most civilized transit in the area. They even have a bar on board. It’s very pleasant. I’d take it all the time if I didn’t have to drive to the terminal, as opposed to catching the transbay bus that stops a block from my house.
a fun activity is to ride a bike across the golden gate from SF up to Tiberon, have lunch, catch the ferry back. If Tiberon is too far you can also catch the ferry from Sausalito
I read once that a huge issue with US metro is our over the top strength requirements. I wonder if that is still true. It is clear that Europe/basically anywhere has far more expertise and success in this than we do. Too bad it isn't as easy as 'we accept all country xxx regs and can start buying their stuff/using their designs'. I'm not that naive to think that is really a possibility, or that doing that would solve the other massive issues with US mass transit, but we can dream of transit like Tokyo can't we!
The car strength requirements only apply to mainline rail, not rapid transit like BART which runs on dedicated rails. And even on mainline rail, the FRA now accepts Europeans rolling stock as of a few years ago.
There's more to it than that. Our freight trains are much larger, heavier, and longer than swiss/European freight trains. It's not unreasonable to think that a passenger train sharing track space with North American freight trains would need to be more heavily built, if withstanding a collision is a goal.
There are other options. Positive train control is better than strong cars - train control means the trains can't crash in the first place (they can still derail, but you can't run into a slow/stopped train in front of you as the train will automatically stop if it cannot verify there is no train on the track in front of it). This is now mandatory in the US (with a lot of fine print exceptions).
PTC generally is designed to fail safe, so it will stop the train if something might be wrong. Nothing is perfect, but everything has a compromise and strong trains have a lot of negatives - they cost more, use more energy (read global warming as it there is normally some non-clean energy in the mix).
Swiss trains from Stadler are in fact selling rather well in the US recently (Caltrain, e-BART, New Jersey Transit, Austin, Dallas, and most recently Metra in Chicago)
45-65 miles range, and 20-30 minutes to charge 20->80%. Better than I would have expected, and certainly could work well on shorter routes where full electrification is impractical. Sounds like it will be built in the US as well.
> I read once that a huge issue with US metro is our over the top strength requirements. I wonder if that is still true. It is clear that Europe/basically anywhere has far more expertise and success in this than we do.
No, our trains are just waaay shorter - around 740-835 meters and a maximum weight of 2.200 tons [1].
US trains however? 3.6 km regular length limit [2], with the record being held by a 6.5km long and 48.100 tons weight. Even just at shunting, the forces in play are so much larger than here in Europe.
> Buff strength is a design term used in the certification of rail rolling stock. It refers to the required resistance to deformation or permanent damage due to loads applied at the car's ends, such as in a collision. Particular emphasis on buff strength is placed in the United States, with buff strength requirements there being higher than in Europe.
Really the worst-case scenario for a train crash is a collision on the side, because carriages are not built for it. This is the main reason why the Eschede train disaster [0] killed 101 people - the train "folded" because part of a broken wheel had flipped a railroad switch underneath the moving train. Then the folded carriages crashed sideways into a bridge.
Europe doesn't get quite the train length that you see in the US. Also automatic latching versus manual latching on train cars in the US. The US was first to bump latch cars smacking them into one another.
It was great until someone really sketchy sat across from you. I remember riding during the pandemic and some guy sat across from me and started smoking crack. I guess that could happen with any seating arrangement, but it was particularly uncomfortable sitting right across from me and facing me.
That’s a bigger problem than seating arrangement I guess.
You don’t have to be intentionally destructive to destroy fabric seats on a train. The number of peoples moving through every day (especially coming in from outside) will do a lot of damage on its own
japanese metro trains with crazy high ridership numbers still have fabric seats (the yamanote line in Tokyo for sure), with swift and certain enforcement of existing rules, the US could have nice things again too
Very cool to see these trains lasted 50+ years if I understand correctly (?). I wonder if there’s an opportunity for BART to switch to standard gauge in the future or as part of retiring trains, or if that’s even a good idea for cost savings? Could they build a narrow rail inside the wider rail? Or is this idea not worth it?
> I wonder if there’s an opportunity for BART to switch to standard gauge in the future or as part of retiring trains, or if that’s even a good idea for cost savings?
I'm guessing it would be massively expensive, and it's not clear to what end they would change it.
It's not like they could then buy cheaper off-the-shelf trains, since the trains still have to be designed and built for the particular system in other ways, i.e. controls, propulsion, and custom interiors.
Also, BART doesn't share tracks with any other system, so there's no reason to do it for compatiblity's sake either.
> the trains still have to be designed and built for the particular system in other ways
Aren't Caltrain's new electric trains essentially off-the-shelf? A few years ago when they needed more capacity, they bought more bi-level Bombardier cars from another agency. They went into service without being repainted.
Fixing the gauge mistake will probably never pay for itself (NYC can't even settle on a car width), but it'll be a never-ending headache and tax for the agency.
The Caltrain KISSes are not really off the shelf, in many ways, good and bad and ugly.
The (arguably) good: 1) they have a boxier profile than the standard KISS, which some have complained about, but the reason the European version is less boxy is because Europe has a more restrictive loading gauge (the allowable cross-section of the vehicle), resulting in a more cramped upper level. Caltrain doesn’t have this issue, and so the upper level will not be cramped. 2) The Caltrain KISS is more powerful than the standard, which would allow for a faster top speed… if the corridor was upgraded to make use of it, which it is not. Maybe someday.
The bad/silly: two sets of doors… a higher set since HSR might allegedly someday come to this corridor and require changing the platform height, and a lower set because that ain’t happening for a long time, if ever. I think there are some other bad/silly things which I’ve willfully forgotten about (I think they fucked up the ADA lifts somehow?), which I’m sure are documented somewhere on Clem Tillier’s excellent blog.[0]
The ugly: “buy America” requirements forced Stadler to build an entire factory in the US, raising the cost by over 50% compared to the standard KISS. This is the bad kind of industrial policy which raises costs without actually building up US industrial capacity in this field (if Stadler closed the plant tomorrow, the US wouldn’t retain any expertise or capacity to build trains).
Not that I think that protectionist economic policy is necessarily healthy, but if Stadler closed the plant tomorrow wouldn't we still presumably have some skilled workers that have been trained to do this kind of work? I don't think it's necessarily a huge or a lasting benefit, but if I wanted to open a plant the day after they closed theirs I'd probably look to do it in the same region, hoping to piggyback off of some of the expertise they established, no?
The way the Buy America rules work, there’s a certain percentage of work that has to be done in the US, and the rest can be done overseas. My understanding is that Stadler does most of the higher-skill work in Switzerland with its existing workforce, ships the components to Utah, and does final assembly there. Basically they do the bare minimum in the US that’s required under the law, so I’m not sure that this transfers a huge amount of domain expertise to the US workforce.
That depends on whether a significant fraction of those workers really are skilled (doing old-school manual machining, manual welding etc.) or they are just semi-skilled and thus interchangeable CNC operators and robot maintenance technicians.
This is because the oldest tunnels (the numbered lines) are physically narrower than the other two systems (lettered lines), so you can’t run the bigger trains through them. It would be (relatively) easy to run the narrower trains on the wider lines, but would need some retrofitting, and reduce throughput way too much.
Caltrain shares track with freight rail, and doesn't run trains nearly as closely or frequently as BART. No other type of train makes sense to run on BART's tracks.
they were off the shelf into caltrain got their grubby hands into the procurement process! they are about twice as powerful as standard KISSs. also stadler had to install an extra powerful air compressor so they can ding their fucking bell
It's not like they could then buy cheaper off-the-shelf trains, since
the trains still have to be designed and built for the particular system
in other ways, i.e. controls, propulsion, and custom interiors.
They could but they've doubled down on American exceptionalism (or NIH if you prefer). For instance, Muni's Siemens trains (and the Boeing/Vertols and PCCs before them) are far closer to a standard train than BART's stuff. The real advantage is in cheaper propulsion and maintenance kit. BART runs a non-standard voltage and had a ton of trouble sourcing thyristors for their old fleet. Track maintenance vehicles also need to be custom built.
BART doesn't share tracks with any other system, so there's no reason to
do it for compatiblity's sake either.
BART doesn't share tracks because they can't. As a result they run three separate fleets of wholly incompatible vehicles for no good reason. eBART is a standard gauge diesel multiple unit system – because even with BART's typically inflated ridership estimates they couldn't make the expensive mainline kit work. That would've been a perfect opportunity to start the excruciatingly slow process of converting the mainline to more current standards.
Bart picked India broad gauge. While it isn't common in the US, it is common in the world (mostly India as you can tell by the name) and so there are plenty of off the shelf train components available in the world market (though the US often has goofy Buy American rules that get in the way). Even at that the only difference is the axles which are easy for any manufacture to substitute on an otherwise off the shelf train.
Don't get me wrong, I think BART should have just gone with standard gauge. However the gauge isn't goofy and is not a source of big problems.
The SF bay area rail and transit system seems to be a good argument for an eventual unified transit authority that will combine BART, Caltrain, etc. – undoubtedly adopting the worst features of each system in the process.
That's what MUNI is. It started as hundreds of independent railways crisscrossing the city. They slowly unified them into the cacophony that is MUNI.
I say cacophony because there are bus', cable cars, vintage light rail, modern light rail, subway, tram, local neighborhood shuttles, and I'm sure I'm missing a few.
Well yeah, that's what a modern public transportation system looks like - I know that's unusual in the US, but if you look at other places, e.g. Europe, you will also have buses, trams/light rail (with tunnel segments and heritage services for tourists) and minibuses/neighborhood shuttles in most bigger cities. The only thing that sets SF apart is the cable cars - and having both a fully grade-separated metro (BART) and a light rail system with tunnel sections (Muni Metro) - usually in cities with a "full metro" the light rail is a tram without tunnel stations.
I mean, Montréal also regularly sees temperatures around -30 C in the winter, so it's not completely ridiculous to suggest this decision may be informed by fundamentally different design constraints from, say, San Francisco or many European cities [1].
You can do covered at grade (e.g. Sofia Metro has a few km section like this - covered to protect against the cold weather in the winter, but at grade to save costs).
Montreal did it wrong so nobody should try again? I'm struggling to see what your point is. Montreal is in north America, not Europe, in case you're not aware.
You don’t need a unified authority to run integrated transit. Most German cities are covered by an association of various cities.
One major benefit vs a shared authority is if someone wants to pay less into it and someone else wants to pay more, it is hard to get the two sides to work well.
Unfortunately the Bay Area is far too provincial to create a coherent system out of the twenty-odd systems out here, each with their own fare structure.
It’s complicated and expensive. MTA in NYC created a big mess when it swept up private bus companies. I think they have 4-5 bargaining units for busses alone.
no fancy words needed -- when the switch to electronic common fare (Clipper) was initiated, agencies including BART dragged their feet. After a few months (quarters?) of this, a BART finance officer said bluntly on the record "the cash flow we control at BART is part of our planning and stability" and flatly refused to switch completely to Clipper.
That wouldn’t magically improve if they came under one corporate umbrella, though.
Look at New York MTA where the LIRR and Metro-North have had the same owner as the subway since 1968 and yet there is no combined way to pay or integrated fare.
BTW the Caltrain corridor is SP's corridor (Standard and Pacific was Leland Stanford's gold mine) which SP maintains to run the occasional freight train and also gets paid to run caltrain on it.
I haven't been following the whole electrification effort (except seeing it happen): will S&P still run diesel freight on those tracks?
Why? Though in the US I believe freight typically has RoW priority over passenger fleets, in practice on that route I've only seen (/heard) freight at night.
I have seen rail deliveries during the day in Redwood city to the port but I don't think that spur connects to that line...? It is shocking that the rail runs right down residential streets with NO separation to keep kids from being run over.
I believe freight typically has RoW priority over passenger fleets
That's a big part of it.
The other part is that UP is making electrification difficult and more expensive. UP wants to run double stack cars but the overhead wire would eat into the vertical clearance. I believe there were issues raised with horizontal clearance too.
and it is a standard gauge, "Indian gauge", just not the standard gauge. which keeps it free from freight trains and other mixed traffic, which helps with punctuality.
also if they wanted to change that they could introduce a dual gauge track, like the Stuttgart area did for their mixed tram/underground
Wind stability was a given reason back when it was planned to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, but that never happened
BART’s planning is basically a comedy of errors by aerospace engineers who specifically did not want to learn anything from other rail systems, hence the nonstandard car layout, the nonstandard electrification, the nonstandard wheels that make too much noise, etc. BART themselves clearly do not believe much of it anymore given that they operate a standard gauge line.
I recently visited SFO for the first time and loved the transit system - although the noise level of BART seemed… excessive.
Really stood out in the trip from the airport it was significantly louder than my flight. I was worried I was losing my mind, thanks for confirming that it’s real.
I used to ride BART 4-5 days a week, through the Transbay tunnel. I frequently got the "sustained loud noise" warning from my watch, notifying me that the combined duration and intensity of the ambient sound was enough to damage one's hearing.
I'm curious if they could have solved the crosswind stability issue with fences along the track to block the wind. Although fences cost money, and it would ruin the view.
of course it's not needed because there are more ingenious solutions to the energy consumption problem and crosswind stability.
for example recuperation of break energy. thus you can build slightly heavier trains which withstand side winds despite the slightly narrower standard gauge, which again allows you to buy internationally, further saving costs and further benefiting from energy saving innovation.
bY using an unusual gauge they painted themselves into a corner (another idiom) as they can't easily sell old material on and buy newer BART cars.
Did you read the report[1] in the page that you linked?
On p. 2, it explains that the BART cars were specifically designed to be lighter weight than normal rail cars in order to minimize the energy required to rapidly accelerate to 80 miles/hour (129 km/hour). The lighter weight makes them less stable in crosswinds.
On p. 13, there's a short cost analysis, and their conclusion is it will save them $2 million overall because it will cost additional money to build but will save even more money on energy.
So it's a different trade-off. They gave up stability to gain energy efficiency. So they then did something to regain the lost stability.
The rails themselves have enough room. The issues start with the nonstandard loading platforms, track profile and switches, and power, and continue for quite a while. Once you get everything working again, any cost savings are gone.
Until you want to expand to low (by BART's low standards) ridership areas like Contra Costa. Or once the area transit agencies are consolidated and then tasked with expanding e.g. SMART.
Yeah it would've been best to standardize 30-40 years ago. There are still tangible benefits today especially as expanding rail service in the Bay Area becomes more popular. Besides, BART is struggling mightily with their proprietary power kit (e.g. mystery power spikes along the orange line).
Metro, not light rail. Light rail is an ambiguous anglophone North American term (because anglophone North America kind of sucks in transit) that can mean anything between a tram and a mini metro, but it's wholly inappropriate for BART and for the Movia trainsets.
Also, it's kind of by luck - BART uses the so-called Indian gauge, and Movia trains have been acquired by Indian cities for their metro systems, so Bombardier/Alstom already had everything in place.
The weird gauge is indeed weird, but is generally overstated as a problem for BART. There’s not much to be gained by changing it system-wide, and it would be at great cost.
It’s sometimes claimed to be a driver of costlier rolling-stock acquisition, but this is dubious. There are many track gauges around the world, and not a lot of evidence that nonstandard ones cost dramatically different amounts. And even if bespoke gauges did cost more for economies-of-scale reasons, BART’s gauge is hardly unique: it’s the same gauge used in India, and just a couple mm from the one used in Iberia and much of Latin America (in practice they are demonstrably interchangeable). So there is a huge amount of rolling stock being manufactured for this gauge. It doesn’t require reinventing the entire production process or something.
The other claimed benefit to standardizing BART’s gauge that I sometimes hear is interoperability with other systems, but this is very difficult for several larger reasons, and also not necessary or desirable. For one thing, BART also has a nonstandard wheel profile and corresponding rail profile, so you wouldn’t just need to move the rails closer together, you’d actually have to replace them all. Beyond that, mainline rail systems have tougher crash standards than fully-separated metro systems (even after recent reforms), so you couldn’t run BART trains onto mainline tracks unless you bought heavier (and more expensive) rolling stock than what BART and other metro systems normally buy. Another issue is that mainline rail systems use different signaling and electrification (if they even have electrification) systems, which would require either an incredibly expensive overhaul or the use of multi-current/multi-signaling trains, which again increases the cost. Also, mainline rail is generally not grade-separated like BART, which would need to be changed at great expense, or BART would have to accept reduced reliability due to grade-crossing conflicts (this matters less for infrequent regional rail, but is huge for BART which must timetable dozens of trains per peak hour through the Y-junction in Oakland). Stations would also need to be harmonized to the same platform height (BART’s is different from any other system in the area) and length (stations would need to match BART’s extremely long trains).
Interoperability also doesn’t offer much benefit. Usually I hear about this in the context of Caltrain: instead of having these fragmented systems, wouldn’t it be nice if BART served the peninsula? I agree! We can do this by merging the agencies and putting new logos on the trains, without worrying about replacing rails and redoing the electrification that Caltrain is just finishing up with. I’m only slightly oversimplifying. We should continue iteratively upgrading Caltrain into true rapid transit with things like BART-style level boarding, all-day high frequencies and regular intervals, and grade separation. And we should extend what is currently known as Caltrain downtown and then across to the East Bay[0], providing good transfer opportunities with current BART. If this is done well, it should all feel like one regional rapid-transit system to the rider[1], much like New York subway and Berlin U-bahn riders usually don't even realize that they’re actually using multiple incompatible systems. At the end of the day, good integration and high service quality are what matter to the rider, not the underlying technology.
I think eBART contributed a lot to the idea that BART’s gauge is a big problem, since this weird DMU thing was sold under the premise that “normal BART” was too expensive. Really the things that were (allegedly) too expensive for this low-ridership exurban tail were electrification and the huge stations necessitated by BART’s extremely long trains. Those factors would've still been there even if the rails matched up.
So was it pointless and dumb for BART to use a nonstandard track gauge? Yeah. It was part of the marketing for a “space age” system that wanted to be seen as different from ye olde train. But is it really a huge problem that’s worth correcting? Nah. It’s only worth changing part of it if you wanted to convert a segment of track from mainline to BART or vice versa—and the cost of the track stuff would pale in comparison to other factors (electrification, signaling, stations, grade separation).
You seem to know thing or two about BART's rail infrastructure. I want to pick your brain on something.
The new BART fleet is much nicer than the old fleet in many respects, except for one very big issue: when a few drops of water fall onto the track, they have to slow down all the trains traveling through affected parts of the system. Worst case in my experience, this increases my travel time by 33%, which really adds up on the longer distance rides. My understanding is that in the rain, the new trains are just too good at applying brakes to all the wheels when they detect the wheels slipping on the tracks, and as a result, the wheels grind against the track to create flat spots. The current mitigation is to slow down the train, and it doesn't sound like they've figured out a long term solution yet.[0]
Your point about the system having a "nonstandard wheel profile and corresponding rail profile" stood out to me here. So I'm wondering, just how nonstandard is that? And is this wheel flat problem something exclusive to BART (and, perhaps a result of this nonstandard wheel profile)?
> so you couldn’t run BART trains onto mainline tracks unless you bought heavier (and more expensive) rolling stock than what BART and other metro systems normally buy
That is no longer true. The FRA rules that required heavier rolling stock on mainline rail no longer exists. You will find many people buying trains(and thus should know) who are unaware of this rule change.
My understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that the 2018 FRA reforms still set a higher crashworthiness standard for mainline stock than fully-separated metro (due to interactions with freight and road traffic), and that this is the case in Europe too. But yeah it’s a huge improvement from the old “rolling bank vault” era, and definitely maddening that many US agencies are still so incurious about improving things! At least Caltrain bought decent-enough modern trains.
Last time I rode BART in 2013, the stations were creepy quiet and the cars were dilapidated. Fruitvale notwithstanding, it seemed like a place where people get stabbed. Has it improved? Or is still a typical American public transport Catch-22: not enough passengers to justify investment and not enough service to justify ridership.
Ouch. That's the problem. America is still too in love with Los Angeles-style layouts: expensive and unhealthy single-occupant ICE cars and urban sprawl with gridlock and long commutes between city cores and residential cul-de-sacs far away.
The aim should either be vastly more remote work, residing closer to work, or closer to mass transit between work. The first way is simpler, cheaper, and does away with about half of a transportation needs.
Reading this I didn't think I'd feel so nostalgic for those cars but the track was at the end of my street where I grew up, so I saw and heard them all the time. My parents commuted to the city on Bart and for a few years after college we all commuted together. As kids, we terrorized the trains a bit and that's how we discovered that Bart had helicopters. The 70's sure were fun.
I just moved to Oakland a couple years ago and I recently watched the TV show I'm a Virgo, which is set in Oakland. I never realized how iconic that sound is until I saw it on a TV show and instantly recognized it.
I've been using BART all my life, and while I'm not old enough to have been doing so since it first came into service, I did get to experience it during its glory days. It legitimately felt like getting on an airplane, and it was fascinating to young-me, as trains are to many kids.
For those who didn't know, bart used to have:
- Generously padded cloth seats
- Carpet (!!!)
- Free parking
- Magnetic paper tickets, and the turnstile machines would stamp the remaining balance upon exit. They'd also get demagnetized all the time, or get stuck in the machine.
Yes, the cloth seats and carpet were terrible ideas, but before they got all disgusting, they looked and felt nice. Bart used to be really nice, it was clean, and people generally respected the system. I still think BART is fantastic, but I don't deny it has its problems.
Anyway, BART dropped a ton of merch when they were decommissioning their old stock, and I managed to snag an aluminum car ID plate and a real system map! https://imgur.com/a/rCvf93S
I might be remembering this wrong but I seem to recall being able to start out on a bus in Livermore and make all the way to Fremont (or Frisco once to see The Smithereens doing a free concert in Justin Herman Plaza on a school day) just using transfers from the original ticket. Pretty sure the BART ticket would get you on a bus but not sure about the other way around as this was quite a long time ago.
Pretty good deal for a delinquent minor with hardly any money.
Sure, and Marin (Bay Area) also has fabric seats, but their public transit sees much lower ridership.
It's hard to overstate how vile the old wool seats were on BART. It took the NY Times reporting that the wool covers harbored MRSA and other nasties to prompt the switch to vinyl.
> wish they could run one with the carpeted floors and fabric seats
Oh dear god, you just brought back the horrors of a Southeast Ireland (Enniscorthy) pub’s carpeted fucking bathroom. You know you’re a pub. You know you’re in Ireland. And yet you chose carpeting laid in 1910 and decided every day thereafter “yeah, looks good.”
Carpeted bathrooms... I had a relative with a shag carpet in the bathroom. The cocaine must've been blowing hard in the 70s/80s for that decision to have made sense.
I also had a carpeted bathroom in my first apartment. I don't know what the fuck the landlord was thinking.
My wife and I once looked at a house that had a huge bathtub, sunken directly into the floor, in the center of the bathroom, surrounded by shag carpet, all the way up to the edge of the tub.
Carpeted bathrooms, in homes, were very much A Thing in Ireland for a surprisingly long time; even after cheap vinyl flooring became available, people kept putting them in, until the 80s or so.
First sentence of the article: “A Bay Area Rapid Transit prototype train poses at the Lake Merritt station in Oakland prior to the start of service, in late 1971 or early 1972.”
What's hard to understand about hot boxing a train?
One of my more memorable experiences on the LA Metro was walking into a train that smelled like 100% bona fide human fecal matter. As in, there is almost no way that if you went looking you would not have found a huge pile of it in some corner. Naturally, everybody went about their day acting like nothing was wrong. Except for one guy, who pulled out a huge blunt and just started huffing and puffing on it until eventually the weed was on-par with the shit, and later ended up totally overpowering it.
I personally prefer not to involve myself with weed, but there's no denying it's a better experience than huffing literal shit.
On a train, a hot box is a failure of a bearing on an axle, resulting in heat, often smoke, and sometimes fire. If it's not caught in time, it ends up with the axle failing from the heat, resulting in a train derailment. It's a "stop this train sooner than immediately" kind of problem.
It's not the kind of thing that people do to a train.
