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The train arrival announcements on BART are extremely robotic and hard to hear
@skinnylatte THIS!
It also took me weeks to realise the MUNI was saying “2 car shuttle” instead of “2 car shovel” as well ^^;
️ @skinnylatte I wonder if they are on the original system. What I noticed, way back when, was BART seemed to still be running on Day 1 systems and not refreshing stuff.
@fuzzface they have brand new trains in the entire fleet! That took a while
@skinnylatte Strange fact: BART train tracks are not standard gauge (distance between the rails) so other trains cannot easily use those tracks, everything is a bit custom. https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2
@fuzzface same gauge as Indian railways!
@skinnylatte Yup. Makes you wonder.
@fuzzface @skinnylatte Ooh, weird personal factoid: the guy who’s house we bought was a BART engineer (Ukranian, paranoid of the KGB, even in northern California) who worked on designing those rails!
@fuzzface @skinnylatte It’s so funny how people’s lives secretly crisscross! I felt I had to say something, just because it was so odd! 
@fuzzface @skinnylatte the voice is the same as it was in the 90s! Couldn’t really understand it back then, either…
@josh0 @skinnylatte I’m not much of an expert on BART, if I could hazard a guess I’m wondering if the voice is being generated by an old school chipset at the station, which would imply station by station upgrades. Are the Passenger Displays on the platforms still using small incandescent lights? That isn’t related, but it is a curiosity.
@skinnylatte @josh0 Oh no, the mag tape on paper cards? They are still using those???
@skinnylatte @josh0 Which is amusing in a way. MUNI is finally upgrading their really old train control system that was state of the art in the 1980’s, I think. https://sfist.com/2024/08/07/muni-to-update-train-control-system-from-floppy-disk-era-over-the-next-ten-years/
@fuzzface @skinnylatte when I moved to DC in 2008, they were still using the same mag stripe cards. Weirdly, Baltimore’s subway uses the same cars as 90s BART, as well as the same turnstiles! First time I went into a station was very disorienting because it was so familiar. I’ve only used an NFC ticket on my phone there, though, so no idea if they do or did have the same paper tickets.
@josh0 @skinnylatte Yup. Those are finally gone. However, the smart card replacement has a security flaw and Phones occasionally glitch. Or I should say they did. About five years ago I stopped commuting regularly.
@fuzzface @skinnylatte well that’s good, at least. I left DC about 15 years ago, and have only used Metro a couple times since, but always with the Apple Pay transit thing.
@josh0 @skinnylatte Yup. Good way to go. The rollout for phones was rocky. It stabilized after I stopped commuting.
@skinnylatte @fuzzface I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever bought tickets with cash until this past December when I used a Clipper card for the first time. Usually put in exact change for the fare I needed, or just a $10 or $20.
@fuzzface @skinnylatte the displays have been updated! At least at the stations I’ve been to recently (Downtown Berkeley and Embarcadero). Sadly, it doesn’t look like I took a picture of them when I was back in December.
