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.
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?
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.
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?
Without knowing exactly what BART has planned, as a general matter it's OK to exercise free speech on the station concourse, which is to say outside the the fare gates, as long as one is not obstructing other users of the transit system. BART is attempting to avoid a protest being held on the actual platform where trains are going past, both because of the minor risk of someone falling onto a live rail and electrocuting themselves, and because of the more realistic risk that protestors will attempt to do the same thing as last month - stop trains by holding the doors open and/or climbing on top of them, thus bringing the BART system to a halt on the San Francisco side.
I'm in tepid agreement with the BART management here; while I feel that BART police are indeed trigger-happy and need reminding that protection and service can often be accomplished without needing to shoot anyone, I don't see what good it does to hold passengers hostage just because they happen to be riding the BART at the time of the protest. Yes, yes, protesters want to draw attention to their cause, but there are other ways to do that, such as by running for election to BART's board of directors [0]. Recent protests at transit stations in SF have featured masked anarchist wannabes smashing up Castro subway station [1] and racial epithets directed at a BART spokesperson [2]. This is not really my idea of healthy civic society at work.
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.
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.
The BART stations in downtown San Francisco are all deep underground (two to three long flights of stairs / escalators). Service in them, and in the tunnels between them and under the Bay, is completely dependent on BART running cell repeaters.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
That actually seems reasonable to me. There's no easy way to swap a car out of the train in-station, and it would be next to impossible to keep everyone out of one of the cars in the train. Would probably be better if they had some way of quickly locking the door closed, but the trains don't seem to have that feature.
This has happened a few times this year. Although the video is dated April 1, I can vouch for the authenticity; this is my neighborhood line and I have gotten used to the recurring problems of particular rail carriages. If it were up to me I'd scrap the light rail on the west side of the city and put in buses instead.
It took me most of the way through that video to realize that one of the doors was open. It's frightening that the door malfunctioned and that the sensors apparently aren't working (or don't exist).
I've ridden Muni only a handful of times. On one of them, a homeless man threatened to cut my throat with a knife. Admittedly, it was because I stepped up when he began screaming at a non-white person (Middle-Eastern, perhaps, with some variant of head scarf) and her toddler.
Oh the sensors work - they make an earsplitting beeping when the door fails to close. But sometimes the drivers just take off anyway. This is a proble, with some of the older drivers who are only thinking of their pension in my view; there are a lot of hardworking and safety-minded drivers and station crew, but it only takes one irresponsible person to ruin the good work of many others.
In my experience, BART trains run very regularly, usually on the exact posted schedule. They have unimpeded tracks, so except for mechanical problems and sabotage, they are very reliable. SF MUNI busses and light rail, on the other hand, can be very slow and random, at the mercy of street traffic for most of the routes.
Assuming for the moment that a violent protest is a bad thing, if someone knows a bad thing is going to happen but does nothing to stop it, do they share responsibility? What if they only suspect a bad thing will happen?
I just can't stand this mentality. Avoiding doing something just because there might be a mere possibility of being sued for it is a total copout.
If you have pretty a good reason to believe something bad will happen, one ought to do their best to protect anyone that might be potentially harmed.
But as far as I've heard, all BART has been going off of are anonymous blog posts about gathering for peaceful protests.
If there is some kind smoking gun of violent intentions, I have yet to see it.
It seems to me that both sides have been escalating and blowing a non-situation (shutting power to leased, shared-carrier facilities) out of proportion. It's one thing to reduce coverage, and an entirely different thing to intentionally jam.
There is, of course, the contextual undercurrent of Oscar Grant being murdered by Johannes Mehserle.
I don't actually think just covering their ass and not getting sued is the BART admins' motivation. I think they honestly believe it's the right thing to do.
Nobody knows if a protest is going to turn violent before the protest happens. Even if it did, you still have the right to peacefully assemble until violence begins.
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.
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.