A computer upgrade has shut down BART

Yeah I was pretty blown away when I visited San Francisco just how archaic it was. In the same place you have driverless cars you have a metro payment system from like 70s USSR or something.

snark is not productive.

A significant amount of BARTs budget goes to inflated salaries for operators and ticketing staff.

They have very little money left for paying engineering and construction staff.

It certainly doesn't go to Bay Area software companies. When BART originally began letting out the contract to redesign the then-already-obsolete control system in 1992, they awarded it the Hughes Aircraft. That project failed. The current attempt to deploy CBTC was awarded to Hitachi. The supplier of their fare gate system integration was originally IBM and is now CUBIC, a San Diego defense contractor.

If anything the Bay Area has utterly failed to provide systems software of lasting value to address public needs like these.

your tax money broadly speaking doesn't go to BART; it's massively underfunded. not sure why they are the target of the snark.

One way to look at this is that the Bay Area focuses on transportation technology that works and scales regardless of the rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible.

And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood.

There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.

Not to jump on your comment (since there have been quite a few other replies already) but just to add another personal anecdote: having been on the more senior end of a junior merge/deploy gone wrong and losing a Friday night or a weekend ping, I'm okay with an additional empty day throughout the week.

I've found that little things like that breed a growing resentment and stress that compounds, until someone wants to leave the company. Thursday night outage that I have to hop on? Much smaller deal than a weekend where I have established plans.

One can argue "why was the PR approved in the first place", but sometimes people make mistakes. It especially sucks when there are limited people that know how to troubleshoot and resolve the production issues with a system, even more so when the on-call individual may have not even reviewed the code initially.

All that said - I'd love to deploy as normal on Fridays! I've just found that the type of businesses I've worked at can wait until Monday, and that makes our weekends less risky.

Perhaps. But what's the risk-reward? No matter how good your CI/CD is, the risk is nonzero. Do I really need to ship this today and open a can of worms this afternoon?

It is not about fear, it is about risk management.

As an engineer I have absolutely no issue deploying on a friday. But friday bar starts at 4pm, and after that I am not sober before monday.

So leadership don't want me to do it - which is probably wise.

I enforce a work/life balance and this is how the team loses a weekend when something goes wrong.

I hate how people hear "read only friday" and decide to turn it into a CI/CD dick measuring contest.

For "read only friday" to have been a novel idea in the first place, you needed a starting point where conventional practice already was making changes live without stopping to consider the time/day of week.

I really suspect the detractors represent a workflow that would break (or at least introduce pain) if unable to push to production for a few days. So they have to give the hard sell on the benefits of continuous deployment.

To counter the counterpoint. Even if you are better at pushing to production than 90% of the rest of your industry it is still elevated risk and stress so you should avoid it for the sake of your employees. Productivity vs life. If your counterpoint is to claim that you are just as stable pushing to production as you are when you don't, then I would just suggest you're delusional or lying.

this is just mindless blogospam/clickbait/"buy my thing" - the author even admits shipping big changes on friday is a bad idea

This reads like someone who works on a small and simple system.

"Deploy on every commit" lmao

"Shipping software and running tests should be fast. Super fast. Minutes, tops." hahah

True, but it ignores the point of who various services are for. Wealthy professionals in the suburbs tend to vote against mass transit they don't plan on using.

That is mostly a zoning issue, have you seen the density around Tube stations? Compare that to the density around half of the BART stations which are big parking lots surrounded by single family houses. Of course it's cheaper to run a transit system in a city with twice the population density and population in the metro area.

Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data/

BART is one of the most cost efficient systems in the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1d27dvo/us_cost_pe.... It's so efficient that pre-pandemic it got the majority of its funding through fares, not taxes.

By the way it costs exorbitant amounts to build highways too and you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you.

So quite frankly you don't know what you're talking about.

Hey, the Boston T runs some of the time!

Jokes aside, I'd like to see a stack ranking of US public transit. I'd assume NYC and DC are top dogs, but I'm curious about other cities.

Yeah this is basically the private market filling in for our lack of transit down south. Most every other major city doesn't have this, you just take the metro to work like a normal person.

didn't realize cage free pigs lead to such dramatic second order effects =)

Except, as always bureaucratic pay raises.

What on earth does it do that requires a mainframe?

Ironically, the Northstar rail line (one part boondoggle, one part "would have worked if it went all the way to st cloud", depending on who you ask) is shutting down Jan 3 or 4 in 2026, so I wouldn't be surprised to see articles on it and/or the met council before then.

BART specifically is also a kind of lighting rod of the political, social, economic fissure that runs through American culture; the difference in perspective of the adversarial camps, like different tribes.

It is a microcosm, a bit of a litmus test, and an ideological battlefield of the embattled sides. But this example specifically is also a kind of infighting, of the more anarcho-libertarian tech camp that enjoys highlighting and dripping with self-righteousness about any tech related failure of government, i.e., or at least government that does not align with their ideology or control over it.

This fault line of America runs right through things like BART like an effigy or idol that America performs a kind of ritual form of battle on as proxies for all out civil war. Think of tribes you may have seen videos of where they do all kinds of elaborate dances and blustering displays and fake charges to demonstrate their power.

The glee about this outage happening to BART is very much because the libertarian tech progressive types are amused and validated by it, where something more like rashes of violent attacks on BART riders by menaces to society might be something that the "heartland" may become gleeful about, as evidence for how the ideology of SF is messed up. In the cases of violent attacks on BART riders, another camp/tribe would come out and demonstrate their fierceness; the "socially liberal" types from all over the country and even world, would rush to the defense of their ideological idols with a bewildering storm of rationalization, delusion, and excuse making for violent attackers and in defense of their ideology/cult.

It's just elaborate war dances around an idol/ideology to demonstrate how fierce and powerful each party is. BART is just one of the idols in America around which these displays of simulated conflicts happen.

Isn't that kinda what people are doing when they commute in private cars?

Train tracks are a form of centralization. Without the ability to reroute around disruptions (like cars and buses) a single stopped train (e.g. due to mechanical or passenger issues) can stop everything.