The entire Bay Area Rapid Transit system melted down on Friday morning, leaving commuters in the San Francisco metropolitan region stranded and frustrated.
It was the second time in four months that BART trains were out of operation all at once. As of midmorning, there was no projected time for a complete fix.
Alicia Trost, a spokeswoman for BART, said that limited service would resume in the East Bay around 9:30 a.m. Pacific time, but that transbay service into San Francisco and on the Peninsula down to San Francisco International Airport would remain stalled indefinitely.
BART is currently undergoing a systemwide computer network upgrade involving routers and switches. Work on that project went awry overnight, and the transit system could not power up its system on Friday morning. BART discovered the breakdown at 4:30 a.m. and started warning commuters to find other ways to get to work.
A similar shutdown occurred on May 9 — also a Friday — and lasted for several hours.
The outages have occurred as BART faces a make-or-break moment for its survival, as the Bay Area’s remote work culture remains stronger than other cities’, five years after the Covid-19 lockdown. But BART still has less than half the passenger traffic it had before the pandemic, well below the national recovery rate for transit agencies, according to data from the American Public Transportation Association.
San Francisco’s downtown has lagged other cities in seeing a revival, and about a third of its office space remains empty. Fewer workers tend to commute on Fridays than during the middle of the workweek, but the system still carries 160,000 people on a typical Friday.
Before the pandemic shutdown, BART relied more heavily on fares than government subsidies. But it has increasingly had to lean on public funds because of low ridership, and its emergency pandemic funds have nearly dried up.
It is one of several Bay Area transit agencies pushing for voter approval of a sales tax in 2026. The San Francisco ballot next year may also include a parcel tax to help fund Muni, the city’s local bus and cable car system, which is also struggling financially.
If the sales tax fails at the ballot, BART could be forced to make drastic changes, according to system officials. Ms. Trost said that BART is likely to cut two of its five lines, meaning longer waits and more transfers to reach the city. It would also end service at 9 p.m. and close nine stations, she said.
“That’s why we call it the death spiral,” Ms. Trost said, suggesting that such a rollback could discourage even more passengers from using the system.
Janice Li, a member of the BART board of directors, called the morning meltdown “unacceptable” and said that the transit system must now run smoothly if it wants voters to approve the tax to save it.
“We must respond with high-quality service and zero systemwide disruptions between now and November 2026 and beyond if we want riders to trust that this was just a momentary, albeit frustrating, blip,” she said.
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
The post BART Trains Shut Down for the Morning Commute in the Bay Area appeared first on New York Times.
