Transportation: New computer controls make travel more comfortable, thyristors cut costs of motor operation, and new steering systems for cars are tested to improve fuel economy

Trains operating on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco will soon get “a new and very special passenger - the microprocessor,- reported” David Turner, an electronics specialist with Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc., a consulting firm in Los Angeles, Calif. “What makes this passenger so special,“ he wrote in the May 1984 issue of a newsletter put out by the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, “is that it will be in full control of the sleek, 80-mile-per-hour trains.”