

SF's BART braces for another protest - loganlinn
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/15/MNGT1KNJU1.DTL&tsp=1

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bilbo0s
This is why a good leader lets the mob have it's day.

Stop a protest because it turns violent...well everyone kind of expects that.
Even the protesters.

Try to stop a protest before it happens, or throw up logistical
roadblocks...and you end up with the Civil Rights Era redux.

Always let people have their say...and get it over with. You can more easily
stand a gut punch than death by a thousand cuts.

~~~
philwelch
That's what China tried 20-some years ago.

~~~
bugsy
OK, I have to ask what is the meaning behind that comment. I do understand you
are referring to the Tiananmen Square protests.

~~~
philwelch
Before the crackdown, the Chinese government was willing to wait out the
protests until people had their say and it was all over with. Except the
protests went on, continuously, for months. If they had turned violent, they
would have likely been able to overrun the central government entirely.

I'm not going to justify what the Chinese army did in Tiananmen Square, but
what they did, they did as a last resort. If they had been a little more
proactive and arrested the first few hundred people before it blew up, or
impeded access into the square, or did anything to prevent that critical mass
of people from assembling all in one place, it would be a different story.

~~~
bugsy
OK thanks, so it sounds like you're saying that if the government allows even
small peaceful protests, these could turn into larger ones that threaten the
existing power structures, therefore protests should not be permitted at all?

~~~
philwelch
I'm saying it's a complicated issue and no simplistic approach is going to
work all of the time. I'm sorry I can't give you a grand unified theory about
how governments should handle protestors.

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pavel_lishin
So the service outage only affected people underground? I'm not sure how the
stations are laid out - what happens if the protest is held right outside the
station? If they cut service, would people not on BART property be affected?

~~~
Aloisius
You should get service outside the station above ground from the cell phone
towers. Even most of the fare gates aren't deep enough underground to block
service completely.

Once you get past the fare gates though in SF, you typically will head down
some escalators that take you deep enough to block cell service without BART's
cell repeaters.

~~~
jof
Just a point of interest -- most of the SF BART stations are not "repeaters"
per se (except perhaps in the context of a network or higher layer protocol),
but are actually full blown computerized radio systems themselves. I suspect
most are colocated BTSes (or equivalent) that are fed by leased lines.

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gojomo
And this time, people are bringing their own femtocells!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell>

(I don't in fact know if anyone is. But they should! Most US carriers offer
femtocells for home broadband users that could presumably, with some work, run
off batteries and relay traffic up the escalators to a sympathetic ground-
level uplink.)

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georgieporgie
I can't help feeling that BART can't really get anything right. Surly
employees, unusually bad BART cops, smelly trains that run extremely slowly at
random intervals, and now interfering with a protest.

What I don't understand is why they have any interest in hampering the protest
in the first place. Until the protest has been shown to be violent, how is it
even conceivably within their legitimate sphere of influence to interfere with
it? Particularly when it interferes with the service that regular riders have
come to expect.

~~~
benatkin
You left out this, which I happened to catch on twitter the other day:

> One door on the #BART train gets stuck, the _entire train_ is out of
> service. Hundreds of people out onto the platform! #incredible

<https://twitter.com/#!/mjijackson/status/100612825134800898>

I had that same sort of thing happen to me in Phoenix, but people don't take
public transportation as seriously there.

~~~
7402
I question whether one second-hand tweet is a useful data point.

I have ridden BART most workdays for the past 7 years. I have encountered
trains with stuck doors a several times, and on none of those occasions was
the train put out of service. In fact, they even have pre-printed stickers
that say something to the effect of "This door is not working; please use
other door." I have seen these perhaps half a dozen times since I began riding
BART regularly.

Note that these doors were stuck _closed_. It would be an obvious safety
hazard if the door was stuck open - in that case I can well imagine that the
operator would not move the train from the station.

~~~
DrJokepu
Door stuck closed are also a safety hazard as they can hinder evacuation in
case of fire or other emergency and make it more difficult for rescue teams to
enter the train. Imagine a packed railroad car full of smoke, very bad
visibility and panicking people inside. A stuck door can make the difference
between life and death.

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maeon3
For this protest, I say we create a "Congress emergency off switch", only to
be used in exceptional circumstances, so we can stop any single-color
copyright infringements, child pornography breakouts or other crises as
determined by fox news. The button would be hosted by a website, and if enough
people press it at one time, then congress gets shut off and all proceedings
are suspended until further notice.

~~~
akavi
Is this comment being downvoted for being sarcasm, for being poor sarcasm, or
for having been misinterpreted as serious?

Just to sate my curiousity.

~~~
tedunangst
I just don't understand how shutting down congress will stop a single color
copyright infringement from happening.

