All BART trains were stopped due to ‘computer networking problem’

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"

Sorry I will ruin the mystique:

It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.

Oh, that just updates the AAAA record for the Waymo. Totally harmless.

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.

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.

BART can fix that by building dense mixed use -- office, commercial, and residential -- around their stops.

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.

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.

https://www.bart.gov/guide/faq#3

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.

Did they ever fix this as announced in 2022? https://sfist.com/2022/12/08/rejoice-bart-is-dumping-the-6-4...

Oh! I thought they were going to get rid of that fee: https://sfist.com/2022/12/08/rejoice-bart-is-dumping-the-6-4...

You can talk with the clerk to get a refund. But I thought they were doing away with it entirely…

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.

> 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.

bart doesn't get to decide its free.

> when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.

Absolutely not.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

> (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.

The point of the new scanners is you can pay to ride with any payment instrument, not just a Clipper card.

I have no idea and didn’t comment on what the sensors are. Before the new gates, they worked. Now they only half work.