Should we blame BART's endless failures on money—or management—problems?
The agency's been aware of its structural and sustainability issues for decades now. And it continues shooting down innovative new ideas like autonomous vehicle integration. Gregg Dieguez of SHIFT-Bay Area analyzes, just in time for BART's looming $868k deficit.
The saying goes, "You learn more from your mistakes than your successes." In the case of May 9th’s morning BART shutdown, what can we learn from this “Teachable Moment”? It turns out that after several hours, the problem was fixed by rebooting the backup automatic train control system (ATC) system. Isn't this something we all learned from our computers decades ago? First, reboot ….
BART’s clumsiness in handling this problem exposes several deeper, structural failures. That backup system was installed in 2019. BART began construction in 1964 and was operational in 1972. So, it took over five decades for a multi-billion organization to realize it needed a backup train control system? In 1989, I launched what I believe was the world's first real time financial transaction processing system: a mutual fund shareholder accounting system which eventually had over 1,000 mutual funds and a trillion dollars on it. … and we had half a dozen methods for recovering from errors and preventing outages in the computers, the telecommunications network, and the power grid. When the quake hit in '89 and power went out, we didn't miss a single processing deadline. …
Why can't BART demonstrate comparable resilience?
Do they not have disaster scenarios scripted and the recovery processes practiced? If not, after over 50 years of operation, why not? Who is getting fired, for the failure that led to this outage, for the clumsy recovery effort which inconvenienced tens of thousands, and for the failure to plan for potential risks and design for resilience?
BART has been well aware of major problems with its ATC since the infamous “Fremont Flyer” incident in 1972 (pictured above), when a train reached the last station in Fremont and the command to stop was misconstrued, causing the train to fly off the end of the elevated tracks and crash to the ground. After repeated efforts by BART management to deny there were significant problems, public comments and criticisms by the late Bill Wattenburg eventually led to very well-justified dismissal of BART’s then-general manager and the replacement of BART’s Board of Directors.
The original promise to the voters was that BART would operate a “90 mph train every 90 seconds” – along with claims that no one would ever have to stand, which led to the BART cars being delivered without handholds, producing straphangers without straps to hang onto. While the latter was corrected relatively quickly, it took BART decades to upgrade the train control to reach the current level of performance, which at peak is approximately one train through the transbay tube every two-and-one-half-minutes, far short of what was promised.
In an ongoing attempt to upgrade its ATC to a two-minute standard, BART has already spent over a decade developing a new control system that is projected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But in that effort BART has totally rejected autonomous train control, which already operates safely and successfully across the developed world (example: the Vancouver SkyTrain) and which would eliminate the need for highly paid train operators with costly pension and employee benefit plans.
Given that BART has been widely proclaiming that it faces structural deficits requiring up to $350-400 million in new funding (taxes) annually, one might think that saving a major chunk of these costs through automation would be desirable. However, BART decision-makers are very aware that they are one of only four transit systems in the U.S. with directly-elected board members. The board members are supported by transit worker unions, and therefore even mentioning the possibility of automation could cost them their jobs. Thus, instead of having a transit system that produces some jobs as a byproduct, we have a jobs program that produces some transit as a byproduct.
In the end, this system failure was not due to funding issues. BART is still fully subsidized, for the present. The outage is the result of a management problem, NOT a funding problem. Not only is BART swallowing hundreds of millions of dollars annually in emergency taxpayer subsidies, by our estimate it has $20 billion in capital assets will need to be replaced in the near to medium term. And those assets quadruple in cost every 40 years at current inflation.
Read the whole thing here.
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