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Comment by dilyevsky | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious that from 2020 and to this day ridership has collapsed but BART operating expenses went up despite that and all the efficiencies they talk about in your link. Kind of tells you everything you need to know about where the money is actually going...

Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.

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You would not expect a ridership reduction to have any significant reduction in operating expenses. Full trains costs roughly the same as an empty trains.

If ridership is down, I'd expect them to run fewer trains.

The problem of course then is that you create a whole in the bucket. Fewer trains -> BART becomes less convenient -> people choose other options -> lower ridership -> fewer trains -> less convenient ....

> BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget

I would think increased ridership means increased efficiency.

Intreased ridership almost always means better service. Run more service on the lines you have, and run / build more routes so you have a useful network.

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.

BART service area population is comparable to Greater London

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

If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km

> you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you

uhm what?

BART is not a typical metro system in that it serves a lot of suburbs that have very little population density, and was mainly built as a commuter service to get people to downtown SF. So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has without massive upzoning and more infill stations. Comparing it to the Tube which mostly serves the city of London is not an apples to apples comparison. Look at the costs of building new rail infrastructure in London and it's comparable to here.

> If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km

What you're talking about in that link is the extension to San Jose, not day to day BART operations. That one does deserve criticism as they've made poor decisions like not doing cut/cover because NIMBYs in San Jose don't want any disruption to streets. So instead we are tunneling to the Earth first. Elsewhere in the world municipalities understand that it's worth temporary disruptions to roads to bring down costs, but of course America is unique and we have to learn these lessons ourselves.

  So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has
  without massive upzoning and more infill stations.

Yet BART insists on expanding its footprint instead of building infill stations.

The infill stations don't make much sense because they're also low density housing. The fundamental problem with mass transit in CA is the insane insistence to remain low density despite the overwhelming demand for housing. It's the sin that leads to all of the problems the state faces.

No, treating BART as a low-density transit system while granting them right of ways in some of the most dense areas of the country doesn't make much sense. 30th & Mission and 98th & San Leandro would've absolutely made sense while neither Millbrae nor SFO should've ever been built.

I'm not sure why we've drifted talking about new lines/stations. Both Tube and BART hardly built anything in the last 10 years. I was only remarking on operating costs for what was already built by pandemic and the fact that ridership seems completely untangled from it.

It seems to me that BART management did what most of other government bureaucracies did around here during covid - threw their feet on the desk and took an extended 2+ year sabbatical

> have you seen the density around Tube stations?

As a former tube-commuter and occasional BART-user, I'd wager that possibly a majority of the commuting trips in zone 1 are taking people from a mainline train station to somewhere, and then back in the evening. That option barely even exists in the Bay Area - indeed every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.

  every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and
  rent a car instead.

BART really made a mess of transit to SFO, unfortunately. BART ridership never met projections so they played around quite a lot with service between Millbrae and SFO in effort to save money. For a while there was a Millbrae-SFO shuttle. For a while one line provided service during the day and one provided evening and weekend service. Even today only one of the two transbay lines that runs down the peninsula offers service to Millbrae and SFO.

Once you actually get to Millbrae you then get to deal with BART's whole NIH problem manifesting as a refusal (up until recently) to offer timed connections with Caltrain. And, of course, up until 2021 actually getting between the BART and Caltrain platforms involved a ton of walking.

> ...every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.

Why? Last I checked, it's

   * Depart SFO via BART
   * Get off BART at the first stop, Millbrae
   * Exit BART and enter Caltrain

Is there some complication I'm missing (other than the fact that neither BART nor Caltrain are 24/7 services)?

Depending on the year and day of the week it also involved a transfer at San Bruno.

Fortunately they've since reverted back to always running to Millbrae from the airport.

Oh, yeah. I had forgotten about the irregular Millbrae service. I always thought that to be quite strange.

The complication is not physically how to do it, but that the timing is not arranged to line up well, resulting in excessive waits.

I see. Yeah, unless it's rush hour, SF Bay Area public transit is nearly always slower than hiring a private car. I'm glad that it exists, but do wish the towns in the area cared enough to fix that.

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