{"id":89155,"date":"2025-12-10T14:33:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/89155\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T14:33:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:33:15","slug":"for-a-transit-agency-on-the-brink-bart-disruptions-hit-at-perilous-time-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/89155\/","title":{"rendered":"For a transit agency on the brink, BART disruptions hit at perilous time"},"content":{"rendered":"

First came a systemwide BART meltdown<\/a> in mid-May that ground every train to a stop. Just weeks later, twin fires damaged track lines<\/a> on either side of the San Francisco Bay.<\/p>\n

Multiple power outages, myriad equipment issues and a so-called \u201cnetwork storm\u201d \u2014 essentially, a complex computer problem \u2014 again interrupted BART service throughout the Bay Area<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The spate of service disruptions over the last seven months has left Bay Area Rapid Transit reeling, with technicians scrambling to shore up the system and minimize the impact on commuters, finally using the system in rising numbers again. It\u2019s all coming as voters may be asked to provide billions of dollars for the system<\/a> and several other Bay Area transit agencies to stave off a fiscal cliff in 2027.<\/p>\n

\"BARTBART workers investigate the source of an early morning rail fire at the San Leandro BART station on Tuesday, May 20, 2025 in San Leandro, Calif. BART service between the Lake Merritt, Berryessa and Dublin stations was stopped at 5:45 when the fire was reported. (Laura A. Oda\/ Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The latest problems surfaced Monday, when BART\u2019s green and red lines shut down<\/a> for about two hours amid power issues in San Francisco. It marked at least the fourth Monday since Oct. 20 that BART has had significant delays or interruptions to its operations.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust about every day there\u2019s something going on,\u201d said Mike Berry, of Concord, who was waiting for a train last week at the Pleasant Hill station.<\/p>\n

BART\u2019s Board of Directors have taken notice, with some speaking out at a meeting in October about the disruptions. Their comments came after the agency\u2019s general manager, Robert Powers, vowed to \u201cget to the bottom of this,\u201d adding \u201cwe got to do better than what we\u2019re doing right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I look at this and all the incidents happening so close in time, I get a little worried,\u201d said the board\u2019s vice president, Melissa Hernandez, a former Dublin mayor and councilmember. With several BART department heads in the audience, she added: \u201cThere comes a point in time where: Do we have the right people working for BART? And that\u2019s a question I have for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Edward Wright, a board member representing San Francisco, echoed those concerns, suggesting that \u201cit\u2019s taken us too long\u201d to root out and fix systemic issues causing some of the disruptions.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to play into this idea that BART is not reliable \u2014 I think on the whole, we\u2019re delivering a great service,\u201d Wright said. But he later offered a caveat: \u201cThe degree and severity and the frequency of the major service disruptions that we\u2019re having \u2026 is unacceptable.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

The disruptions come despite data showing BART ridership on the rise, as the agency\u2019s leaders tout rising timeliness and consumer satisfaction scores amid ongoing recovery from the pandemic.\n<\/p>\n

In October, an average of nearly 200,000 weekday riders swiped into BART\u2019s 50-station system \u2014 a 10% increase from the same time last year, but less than half its ridership levels of 2019. Its high-water mark came on Oct. 18, when the agency boasted 150,000 trips and the highest Saturday total since the pandemic. In all, BART logged more than 5.3 million trips that month.<\/p>\n

In addition, more than 93% of passenger trips ended with on-time arrivals from July through September, a 5 percentage point boost from the year before, BART spokesperson Alicia Trost. said The agency\u2019s customer satisfaction rate reached 89% that same quarter, nearly 6 percentage points above the same point in 2024.<\/p>\n

\u201cReliability is our brand,\u201d Trost said. \u201cWe have to be reliable to continue to serve the region, and we have been reliable, despite this string of very public incidents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Minor disruptions are nothing new for BART or other major urban transit systems, with stations occasionally closed for medical emergencies, crime and occasional instances of people being hit by trains. But the nature of those delays has shifted in recent months.<\/p>\n

On May 9, all 50 BART stations across the Bay Area shut down<\/a> for nearly five hours after a network connectivity problem prevented controllers from seeing train locations on the tracks. The stoppage happened just as the morning commute swung into gear, prompting gridlock on the region\u2019s freeways as riders scrambled into their own cars or sought rides on Uber and Lyft.<\/p>\n

\"AA BART train won\u2019t stop at the Rockridge BART station due to a systemwide closure that affected all BART stations early Friday, March 9, 2025, as seen from Oakland, Calif. The train ran an inspection to verify the systemwide before carrying passengers at BART stations before 9:20 am, when the closure ended. (Ray Chavez\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0(Ray Chavez\/Bay Area News Group)
\nAt the time, BART officials said the issue was not related to the age of its equipment, but rather the ability for its network devices to property connect to one another. It served as an overture for myriad issues over the following months \u2014 many seemingly without a common root cause.<\/p>\n

Later in May, a fire near the San Leandro station<\/a> shut down the agency\u2019s green line between Lake Merritt, Berryessa and Dublin stations for a week. The first day it re-opened, another track fire across the Bay<\/a> temporarily shut down service south of San Francisco.<\/p>\n

The following month, unscheduled track maintenance caused delays<\/a> for trains moving through San Francisco. Separate power issues then affected riders on the yellow and red lines in July<\/a> and August<\/a> \u2014 the latter causing delays for commuters on the same day that the agency unveiled its new Tap and Ride payment system<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another systemwide shutdown ground BART\u2019s trains to a halt on Sept. 5<\/a>, when routers and switches connecting BART\u2019s systems erupted into a feedback loop that cascaded across much of the agency. The problem \u2014 termed a \u201cnetwork storm\u201d by BART \u2014 began shortly before trains began running at 5 a.m. and lingered into the afternoon.<\/p>\n

Since then, equipment problems have caused temporary disruptions at least a half-dozen times<\/a> across the system, including in the Transbay Tube, West Oakland and again along its Berryessa line.<\/p>\n

Everyday riders voiced fatigue last week at the drumbeat of problems. While numerous commuters told this newspaper they feel safer than ever riding BART \u2014 a major concern in recent years, reaching a fever pitch after the brutal murder of Nia Wilson in 2018\u00a0\u2014 many of them appeared exasperated at the ongoing delays.<\/p>\n

\"NinaNina Knox adds balloons to a memorial for BART stabbing victim Nia Wilson, Monday, July 23, 2018, at the McArthur BART station in Oakland, Calif.. one day after Wilson\u2019s death. (Karl Mondon\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Berry said he takes BART daily into San Francisco for work reasons, said: \u201cIt\u2019s not always a major thing, but there are always 5-minute, 10-minute delays here or there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jennifer Schlecter, another regular rider, lamented that BART service interruptions happen \u201cmore than I would like.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cReliability is a big one for me,\u201d she said. \u201cWould I call BART reliable? Yes. But could they be more reliable? Also yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

BART officials say they have taken each outage seriously. After the Sept. 5 breakdown, for example, officials brought in a team from its networking vendor, Cisco, while embarking on a massive project to help its system avoid similar problems. In addition, it\u2019s moving major system upgrades and changes to its longer service windows \u2014 often, between Saturday nights and Sunday mornings \u2014 while positioning people at various places throughout its system to better respond to future \u201cnetwork storms.\u201d<\/p>\n

More details on work being done to address the disruptions are expected at the agency\u2019s January board meeting, Trost said.<\/p>\n

\"AA passenger waits on the BART platform at the MacArthur Station in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (Jose Carlos Fajardo\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0
\nAdina Levin, executive director of Seamless Bay Area, a nonprofit transit-advocacy group, described the issues as \u201cconcerning,\u201d particularly for a region that\u2019s so dependent on public transportation to keep its freeways passable. Still, she voiced confidence that BART officials are working hard to address the problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt isn\u2019t good but they are really taking the issue seriously \u2014 analyzing what is causing the problems and working on systematic fixes to the problems,\u201d Levin said.\n<\/p>\n

Doing so is key. The disruptions hit at an important issue for transit agencies across the nation, said Jason Henderson, a professor of transport geography at San Francisco State University. Even he has noticed students being late to his classes with greater frequency, often blaming BART issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cReliability is probably the single most important variable in transportation \u2014 more important than speed and frequency,\u201d Henderson said.<\/p>\n

\"AA passenger prepares to board a San Francisco bound BART train at the MacArthur Station in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (Jose Carlos Fajardo\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Staff writer Katie Lauer contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"First came a systemwide BART meltdown in mid-May that ground every train to a stop. Just weeks later,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[389,2647,3767,184,21921,764,3642,7,8,390,18882,46878,391,392,8816,7626,332,393,2333,5564,394,2955,49640,1533,181,17030,23,205,2648,12610,191,100,14293,143,145,144,395,7912,2650,182,13,385,976,101,396,88,1530,397,11006,198,200,2653,3766,1967,398,43205,1689,399],"class_list":["post-89155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-alameda-county","tag-antioch","tag-bart","tag-bay-area","tag-bay-point","tag-berkeley","tag-brentwood","tag-california","tag-california-news","tag-central-contra-costa","tag-colma","tag-commuting","tag-concord","tag-contra-costa-county","tag-daly-city","tag-dublin","tag-east-bay","tag-east-contra-costa","tag-editors-picks","tag-el-cerrito","tag-fremont","tag-hayward","tag-hercules","tag-keywee","tag-latest-headlines","tag-livermore","tag-local-news","tag-local-politics","tag-martinez","tag-millbrae","tag-milpitas","tag-news","tag-north-san-jose","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-peninsula","tag-pittsburg","tag-pleasanton","tag-pm-report","tag-politics","tag-regional","tag-richmond","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-county","tag-san-jose","tag-san-leandro","tag-san-mateo-county","tag-san-pablo","tag-santa-clara-county","tag-south-bay","tag-south-san-francisco","tag-transit","tag-transportation","tag-tri-valley","tag-union-city","tag-walnut-creek","tag-west-contra-costa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}