BART

Bay Area Rapid Transit
East Bay Stations
by Giampiero Caprino

The Simulated Area

This scenario is inspired by the east portion of the San Francisco underground.
In reality BART is a combination of underground and light rail that serves the northern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area.
This simulation is limited to the East Bay. The most important spot of the simulation is the city of Oakland. It is the focus point of all the 5 lines in the network.
The simulation of the west portion of the network (the Peninsula), will be published in a separate scenario to demonstrate how more than one player can play together at the same time using multiple scenarios.

The Lines

A lot of information can be found on the official BART web site (in several languages!):

http://www.bart.gov/

The 5 lines are:

Since all trains use the same rolling stock, in the simulation the train colors are used to show which line the train is travelling on.
In reality each line is identified by its own color, but in the simulation the colors are automatically assigned by the program, and therefore they do not match the official ones.

The Schedule

The simulation is quite different depending on which day is being simulated.
Understandably there are a lot more trains from Monday to Friday. Traffic is lighter on Saturday and Sunday.
The trains are scheduled at fixed times on the hour for most of the day. The frequency is higher in the early morning and early evening. Trains travel well past midnight of each day.

Note that the schedules of some lines are synchronized to allow passenger Timed Transfers at 2 stations of the system: MacArthur and 12th Street/Oakland City Center.
This is quite obvious during the simulation.

On Sunday only 3 lines are active, and so the number of trains is limited.
On Saturday there are 4 lines; traffic is still light, without specific critical points.
The other days traffic is quite intense, both because all the lines are active, and because the schedule of the trains uses the full capacity of the system.

The Simulation

When BART started its service it was the first rail system to be automatically controlled by a central computer. The operators were on board the train only to monitor the safety of the trip.
This simulation is also for the most part automatic. However it still requires human intervention in some critical points.

Simulating Sundays is quite easy. There is only one point where the operator must activate one itinerary. In it, 2 trains leave the same station almost at the same time, but they need to use the same track, and so the second train will stop at the signals waiting for the first one to free the next block. Once you understand how the trains share the track (and you get "in the rhythm"), the simulation can proceed very quickly using a multiplying factor of 30x without getting any penalties.

Simulating Saturdays is a bit more difficult because there are 2 points where the operator must intervene manually to open the itineraries to avoid creating delays. But even in this case the trains movements are quite regular for most of the day, and so the simulation can proceed at 30x without penalties.

The story is different for weekdays. Initially the trains follow the same patterns as the Saturday schedule, but the frequency picks up fairly quickly and I'm not sure that it's possible to simulate the entire day without penalties caused by a train being delayed by the train in front of it.

The simulation uses the official time table for the Fall of 2012 published by BART using the GTFS format.

There is only a very limited number of train assignments that the player needs to do. The terminus stations are not simulated to avoid complicating the simulation too much.
I may introduce those stations and corresponding yard management in a future version.

Enjoy,
Giampiero Caprino