BART service through the Transbay Tube has been restored after a network engineering problem shut down cross-bay service Thursday morning for the second time in less than a week
Service was stopped between the West Oakland and 24th Street Mission stations. Riders were advised to seek alternate means of transportation. At Oakland stations, BART staff redirected commuters headed to the city to ferries and buses.
Just after 9 a.m., the agency posted (opens in new tab) on social media that service had been restored, though systemwide delays were expected to continue.
The closure follows an incident Sunday in which BART service through the tube came to a sudden halt due to a “loss of communication,” according to a BART spokesperson. That outage began just after 4 p.m. and lasted through Sunday night before service resumed Monday morning.
In a message late Sunday, BART said damage to cables near West Oakland station may have been caused by a street-level fire beneath its tracks.
During Sunday’s outage, trains turned around at Embarcadero and West Oakland stations to avoid the tunnel. BART operated buses across the Bay Bridge between the Salesforce Transit Center and East Bay locations, including Downtown Berkeley, near MacArthur BART station, Fruitvale and El Cerrito.
The back-to-back disruptions come at a precarious moment for the transit agency, which is seeking voter approval of a regional sales tax that would raise funds to close a structural budget deficit exceeding $350 million. BART has warned that if the measure doesn’t pass, it could shutter as many as 15 stations by July 2027 and potentially cease operations entirely within two years.
This week’s closures are the latest in a series of service breakdowns that have plagued the system over the past year.