Long wait times have become a regular occurrence on BART amid this winter’s wet weather, and now we have some answers as to why.

KNTV found that the new “Fleet of the Future” trains have a braking problem, and that glitch has been exacerbated by the storms in recent months. New cars make up about half of BART’s fleet.

Apparently, BART data from ​​September through December of 2022 shows rain accounted for nine of BART’s ten worst delays, according to KNTV.

The issue is how the new cars’ brakes respond to wet conditions. BART spokesman Jim Allison told the outlet that the new BART trains have sensors that detect when their wheels slide or spin too quickly, which they do on wet rails. This in turn triggers the train’s emergency “fail-safe” brakes, so they can safely stop at the next station. But that can make all the wheels on the train go “flat,” because the new fleet’s braking system automatically applies to all the wheels at once. The old trains reportedly didn’t have this full automatic wheel control system which creates this issue.

The braking causes uneven wear-and-tear to the wheels, which can mean entire trains need to be repaired, spending days to weeks in the shop.

To try to solve this, BART has been reducing speeds on above-ground parts of its system on rainy days, also leading to delays and not fully fixing the flat issue. Allison admitted to KNTV that the new Fleet is less than perfect and said a long-term fix may take a decade.

The agency is urging riders to check its website and social media accounts for updates on service delays and to plan accordingly.

RELATED: BART Delays Are Worse Than They’ve Been In a Decade, According to BART’s Own Data [SFist]

Image via BART.

A flight to San Francisco International Airport was held up for over nine hours Sunday, but (for once!) the issue wasn't ground delays at our end — instead, a rat that had stowed away on the flight was the cause of the trouble.

According to the Times of India, the saga began at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi at 2:30 a.m. local time. That's when a rat was spotted on Boeing 777 operated by Air India, as the flight was taxiing toward takeoff.

So instead of ascending, the plane turned back around and headed back to the gate, where its 207 passengers were unloaded and the search for the stowaway began.

Six hours later, workers were done fumigating the plane, but they couldn't take off yet. That's because the Delhi-SFO flight is one of the world's longest nonstop flights, at 9506 miles flown over the course of 16-17 hours. Because of its length, the flight "needs two sets of crew, with one commander and copilot operating first half of the flight and the other two, the second half." But due to the rodent-hunting delay, flight duty and time limitations prevented the current set of crews from working that flight, and "The airline had to, at the last minute, look for a replacement crew," a source tells the Times.

It took Air India three more hours before they could find two commanders and two copilots for the flight, which eventually took off at noon local time.

"Passengers were unhappy at the long delay," the Times reports.

But how did the rat get on the plane in the first place? By catering van, the Times posits, quoting an official who says "This is a universal phenomenon. Rats follow the large storage cases in which food trays are kept. The catering vans are like a home for them as food keeps getting dropped."

"Rats get on the high lifts that take those storage cases to aircraft and then remain there. This happens across the world," the unnamed official said, and he or she is not wrong: Just last March, there was a similar scene aboard a British Airways flight headed from Heathrow to SFO, when a mouse was reportedly spotted scampering down the aisle. Guess everyone, even the tiniest among us, wants to go to San Francisco.

While we've all dealt with rodent infestations at home and agree they are gross but manageable, things get way more serious when we're talking about the critters in the air. Then, the madly chewing beasts (after all, "rodent" comes from the Latin word "rodere," which means "to gnaw") "pose a threat to safety by cutting electric wires and sending the systems haywire," the Times reports.

According to a senior commander who spoke with the Times, "Rats on board an aircraft can lead to a catastrophe if they start chewing up electric wires of a plane. If that happens, pilots will have no control on any system on board leading to a disaster."

Previously: Undocumented Mouse Delays SFO-Bound Plane For Hours

Breaking news-major Bart delays this morning systemwide. I am live at the millbrae Bart station @kron4news pic.twitter.com/WtLEDG52sL

— Will Tran (@KRON4WTran) May 30, 2017

It's hard enough to force oneself back to work after a long weekend, but multiple BART issues turned today's typical holiday slog into a delayed mess that likely forced some commuters to question why they got out of bed at all.

It all began at around 6:45 a.m., when a Richmond-bound BART train apparently gave up on life at the East Bay mouth of the Transbay Tunnel, "blocking trains from going into or out of San Francisco" Bay City News reports.

The train gave up the ghost at "an interlocking area called the 'Y' just outside of the Transbay Tube near the West Oakland station. The switch would not respond to remote commands so it had to be manually switched," CBS 5 reports.

By 7:30, another train had been called out to push the disabled train back to the 12th Street Station, where its 60 passengers were evacuated to another train, KRON 4 reports. As you might imagine, some riders took to Twitter to express their wrath.

CBS 5 reports that "BART crews were inspecting the area where the train broke down to make sure no equipment was damaged. The stalled train will also be inspected once it is taken to a maintenance yard to try to find out the cause of the problem."

Trains were then able to single-track through the area, the Chron reports, but delays persisted.

"We do have delays right now because trains are moving at a slower speed and we have a backup of train traffic" BART spokesperson Jim Allison told the Chron.

In addition, reports the Chron, service elsewhere was slowed by "switching problems on various trains in the West Oakland area and several medical emergencies on different trains." All in all, a fantastic way to start the week.

San Francisco International Airport is being described as "a travelers' nightmare", after an ongoing construction project at one of their runways forced the delay and cancelation of hundreds of flights Sunday and Monday.

The culprit is Runway 28L, which NBC Bay Area reports is typically used for arriving flights. As part of a planned upgrade to the runway, which includes repaving and the addition of a line of LED lights down its middle, SFO says the runway will be closed for business from 6 p.m. Fridays to noon Mondays for nine weekends from March 31-June 16.

The runway will remain open on Memorial Day weekend, officials say.

When the closures were announced, SFO officials said that “This project will require runway and taxiway closures which will affect normal operations. Some delays may occur during weekend closures.” They sure weren't kidding, as Sunday saw more than 370 delays and 155 cancellations, KRON 4 reports. According to ABC 7, "some incoming flights had to be diverted to San Jose or Oakland. Passengers were then bussed to SFO."

Passengers NBC spoke with complained about being delayed at the airport overnight as a result of the construction, with one saying that she'd been trying to get home to home to Eugene, Oregon, since Saturday night.

"We landed last night at 11 p.m.," she said. "Waited here until 7 a.m., out by 11."

Another passenger complained of similar issues, saying that first her flight "was delayed four hours...Then we couldn't get a flight until 24 hours later." (Someone get these passengers a therapy pig, stat!)

The problems continue today, according to KRON 4. As of 4:30 a.m. Monday, 51 flights were cancelled and 30 more flights (ten arrivals and 20 departures) experienced significant delays. Expect that number to keep climbing, as officials say it's likely delays and cancellations "will increase throughout the day."

Related: Mayor's Office Blamed In Four-Year Delay To Possibly Name SFO Terminal After Harvey Milk

BART riders at 24 St. station headed to SFO/peninsula told:take alternative trans. due to track power cable issue. pic.twitter.com/BSDipE0wJB

— Cbarnard (@CornellBarnard) August 12, 2016

Bay Area commuters are doubtlessly wondering why they didn't just "work from home" today, after a fire on BART's tracks halted travel for two hours this morning, and left the transit agency with delays expected to continue all day.

The misery began at around 4:45 this morning, when BART reported one of their ubiquitous "equipment problem"s on the trackway near the 24th Street Station in San Francisco.

The problem, according to CBS 5, was that "a bad insulator, one of the pieces of equipment that powers the third rail, failed and caused a small fire."

The fire stopped BART trains literally in their tracks, with no passage through the smoky area and service south of the station (including all eastbound travel from 24th Street on) halted.

The San Francisco Fire Department extinguished the blaze, and "trains were once again running south of the 24th Street Station by 6:50 a.m. but were single-tracking from 24th Street to Daly City," the Chron reports, making for a slow — but, at last, moving — commute.

According to the Chron, damage to BART's “automatic train control system" means that the transit agency will continue to single track through the area all day Friday. KQED reports that this should slow the average BART trip through the area down by six to eight minutes, so plan accordingly.

BART spokesman Taylor Huckaby says that BART should be back to their usual standard of excellence Saturday, however, as "damage to the automatic train control system at Balboa Park will be repaired overnight."

For the "pics or it didn't happen" crowd. pic.twitter.com/VpbknN5lWi

— SFBART (@SFBART) July 21, 2016

BART officials say the trouble began at 7:40 Wednesday night, when the driver of the truck you see above smashed through a trackside fence near the intersection of 4th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in West Oakland, reports the Chron. The vehicle came to a stop on the tracks near Fifth and Jefferson streets, CBS 5 reports, right where trains enter the Transbay Tube.

BART immediately suspended service through the Tube and closed the West Oakland Station, urging riders to seek alternative means of transportation.

While AC Transit was employed to move riders between's SF's Transbay Terminal and Oakland's 19th Street Station, riders complained that the buses ran too infrequently and that communication was poor.

"There were still people who could have got on the bus but they didn't allow anymore folks," one BART rider told the East Bay Times. "So now we're on the second bus. It took one person to tell this whole crowd to move them, to say the BART's up and running."

Over an hour after the crash, the truck remained, according to a tweet from BART.

It wasn't until around 9:08 that the transit agency reopened the West Oakland station and travel through the Tube resumed.

The East Bay Times reports that the errant truck driver, 38-year-old man, "was taken to the hospital as a precaution, then released to police around 10 p.m." He was booked into Santa Rita Jail in Dublin after he was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.

Not only has last night's/this morning's rainfall snarled traffic and turned off the lights, it's also going to delay flights at San Francisco International Airport all day.

According to SFO duty manager Bob Rotiski, the airport has instituted a ground delay program to run from 9 a.m. through 9 p.m. tonight.

That's because, since SFO's runways are only 750 feet apart and run parallel to one another, in times of diminished visibility Federal Aviation Administration safety regulations requires the airport to institute these formalized delays.

Rotiski says that arrivals and departures today are facing at least 46-minute delays, but that that time could increase if the weather worsens (which it might, later this afternoon). As always, he says, travelers or people picking up arriving passengers should check flight times online or with their airlines before heading out to SFO.

Related: Expect More Rain, More Power Outages, And More Wrecks All Day Monday

Bart train slowly filling with smoke. Happy Monday @sfbart

A photo posted by @korov on Oct 26, 2015 at 9:59am PDT

It's been a rough Monday for BART, with equipment problems causing delays on the Pittsburg/Bay Point Line at 7:30 and in in Downtown Oakland at 9. This photo was taken at around 10 a.m., an issue we assume is related to the "10-minute delay at 24th St. Mission in the East Bay direction due to an equipment problem on a train" BART announced at the same time, a delay that was bumped up to a "20-minute delay at San Francisco stations in the East Bay direction due to an equipment problem on a train" as of 10:15.

Update: BART spokesperson Jim Allison tells CBS5 that "a typical propulsion problem likely related to the train’s brakes" caused the train to get smoky "between the Glen Park and 24th Street Mission stations."

Passengers of the smoky train were let off at 24th Street station, and no injuries were reported.

Previously: BART Is Not About That Vape Life, Makes Ban Explicit With Signs

If you're flying into or picking someone up from San Francisco International Airport today, you'd better bring something to do: according to officials, as of 9 a.m. the airport will begin a delay program that can cause arrival delays of almost two hours.

Airport duty manager Linda Perry says that low cloud ceilings (a weather condition that is pretty much what you might expect it to be given its name) mean that the airport needs to institute a delay program for arriving flights from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today, to "ensure passenger safety."

At publication time, Perry didn't have any information on delays for flights leaving SFO, but that could change as the day progresses.

According to Perry, flights from airports within 1600 miles of SFO (that includes major hubs like Denver and Salt Lake) might have to wait as long as 116 minutes to land today. That means that if you're picking up cousin Jeb from Reno, the one who's scared of Super Shuttle, you might be sitting there for a nice long while.

Related: The Best Spots To Eat At SFO, By Terminal

Here's hoping that travelers headed to or departing from the San Francisco International Airport brought something good to do today, as weather delays are expected to make travel a real hassle.

SFO duty manager John Ginty tells SFist that the airport has been put on a ground delay program from 9 a.m. to midnight Wednesday, as heavy fog and rain are expected to hit the area.

"We don't have any delays right now," Ginty said at 8:30 this morning,"but we expect delays to get longer and longer as the day goes on. Things could get really bad by this afternoon," with possible delays as lengthy as 2 1/2 hours.

According to spokespeople at Oakland International and San Jose Mineta, neither airport anticipates any weather-related delays Wednesday.

If you're flying to/from or picking someone up at SFO, you probably already know to check on that flight's status before you leave for the airport. That said, you might also want to bring along some extra entertainment, as postponements can come on quickly. Good luck!

Related: The Best Spots To Eat At SFO, By Terminal

When will our BART nightmare end? Less than a day after a BART train's deteriorating wheel left thousands stranded, and mere hours after BART got stuck in the Transbay Tube, the transit agency has announced that a mechanical problem is delaying passengers yet again.

According to a BART dispatcher, mechanical problems are disrupting travel for riders headed from Daly City towards San Francisco and the East Bay.

"There is a major delay at Daly City in the Pittsburg / Bay Point, Fremont and East Bay directions due to an equipment problem on the track," BART said in an alert to riders and media at 2:10 p.m.

"A routing issue" at Daly City Station is responsible, the dispatcher says, adding that trains should be moving again shortly, and are expected to be back on schedule later today. We'll believe it when we see it.

An "unprecedented" amount of maintenance work at BART's Daly City station means platform closures and service disruptions for passengers traveling through the system this weekend, BART announced Thursday evening.

Only one track between the Balboa Park and Colma stations will be in use all day on Saturday and Sunday, and only one service line, running every 20 minutes, will operate between the 24th Street station and the Daly City station this weekend, the transit agency said in a statement.

On Saturday, the Blue Line and Green Line Dublin/Pleasanton and Fremont trains that normally go to the Daly City station will instead stop at the 24th Street station. In addition, there will be no Red Line service from Richmond to Daly City on Saturday. Instead, passengers traveling to San Francisco and beyond should board a Fremont-bound train and transfer at the MacArthur station.

Fremont trains have been scheduled to operate 12 minutes before and eight minutes after the scheduled times of the Richmond and San Francisco trains, BART officials say.

Two platforms at the Daly City station will also be closed during this weekend's fix-up frenzy, which includes "replacing platform edge tiles that have loosened and are creating a tripping hazard" and "performing preventative maintenance on a variety of systems including elevators and escalators."

The work crews, which BART says will be out in "unprecedented" numbers at the Daly City station, are also expected to address issues with "tracks and trackside areas," and will be "doing maintenance work on public areas like stairwells."

UPDATE 1:43: All clear. Just a backpack with no explosives found. Move along now.

UPDATE 1:26: Canines (gorgeous ones, at that) are on the scene to sniff out the situation at hand. Check it out:

UPDATE 1:20: Union Square has been evacuated. No timetable as to when it will reopen. Below, an evacuated Square:

UPDATE: We're now hearing that Union Square is closed and a shelter-in-place is now in effect. The device was found at Geary and Stockton.

This just in: SFPD reports that a suspicious device found at Market and Powell Geary and Stockton, near to the Cable Car turnaround, has been closed. Cable car, traffic, and Muni are heavily delayed.

As the fuzz recommends, definitely avoid the area for now. Please.

We'll update as soon as we know more.

A man who climbed the roof of a BART train has caused a huge mess this morning for traffic in the East Bay. At around 5:30 a.m., the unidentified man was seen climbing onto the roof at the MacArthur Station in Oakland. For the next couple of hours, it seems, the man got off the train, ran around, and then hopped back on.

SF Chronicle reports: "Over the course of the next two hours police chased the man as he ran across the BART tracks onto the nearby Interstate 580 freeway before returning to the BART station and climbing on top of a waiting train."

At around 7:15, the man was finally detained. KTVU's Sal Castaneda snapped the above shot of the man atop the train.

Expect residual delays throughout the AM anywhere up to 40 minutes.

[Chron]
[CBS SF]
[@sal_castaneda]