BART officials have been quick to reassure the public that Friday morning's complete and total shutdown of the system, which lasted for five hours, was due to a minor, isolated problem that has been addressed.

"We apologize for the disruptive morning and not having train service to get people where they need to go," said BART General Manager Robert Powers in a statement. "Reliability is our brand, and we understand the impact when the system isn’t working. This came down to the fact our control room did not have visibility of our system, and we will not run service if we can’t guarantee safety. We will learn from this incident and are committed to continuous improvement. We are grateful to our partner transit agencies who were able to help our riders this morning."

The problem stemmed from two network devices that were "having intermittent connectivity," the agency said. "BART’s Network Engineering team identified and isolated a redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it. This allowed service to begin."

BART engineers first detected the problem and issued an alert just before 4:30 am Friday, and full service, albeit with delays, was restored as of 9:30 am.

The last time a failure of BART's train-control system occurred, shutting down the entire network during a commute, was in 2019, and it similarly took about five hours for the system to come fully back online.

BART currently sees around 170,000 riders per day on weekdays — and in the post-pandemic era, BART's biggest ridership days have tended to be on weekends when multiple special events are occurring.

But, the loss of BART, even on a day when many hybrid workers would not be commuting, substantially impacted traffic coming into San Francisco.

As one commuter who regularly carpools from Livermore tells KTVU, "I realized how many people ride BART everyday based on how much more traffic there was. Normally it takes 50 minutes to drive in on a Friday. Today it took me an hour and a half. When I saw the traffic and saw the news, I thought, this was chaos."

State Senator Scott Wiener, an outspoken advocate for transit, took the opportunity to link the service disruption with potential future troubles should BART continue to lack proper funding — even though the agency continues to say that backend improvements will make train service more reliable in the future, not less.

"Today’s BART’s shutdown — & the resulting traffic, transit & work disruptions — are another reminder of how essential BART & other transit systems are for the Bay Area. Our region doesn’t work without them," Wiener said in a post on Bluesky. "BART & other systems face devastating service cuts if we don’t shore up their funding. We’re working to do that through the state budget & with legislation to authorize a regional funding measure. We must act to save these systems."

As the Chronicle notes, while BART is, like Muni, facing a potential fiscal cliff without budget cuts or added funding, the agency has been working on a ten-year project, federally funded in 2020, to modernize its train control system, which is scheduled for completion in about six years. Once complete, the agency expects to be able to run 30 trains per hour through the Transbay Tube, up from 24, vastly increasing rider capacity and efficiency — and the first boost in capacity is expected in 2028, with 28 trains being able to run through the tube per hour.

In the short-term, BART says, after today's debacle, "Crews will continue to investigate all related equipment and if equipment replacement or repairs are necessary."

Previously: Limited BART Service Returns After Rush Hour Meltdown Due to Computer Issue

Photo by Jonathan Herman