SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) -- Bay Area Rapid Transit experienced a systemwide service outage for hours Friday and left some morning commuters stranded. Public transit advocates said the outage served as a real-life example of what life without BART would look like.
The root cause of BART’s issues was determined to be network devices that impacted the Operations Control Center staff's ability to monitor trains on the tracks. "It’s not safe to run service" without monitoring, BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said.
Commuting around the Bay Area without enough trains could become the "new normal" if BART and other transit agencies do not receive state and local funding in the coming years, advocates said.
Friday's BART outage also impacted drivers because more cars were on the highways. One commuter who lives in Livermore and carpools to work in San Francisco said, "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."
On average, more than 170,000 people ride BART daily.
Riders wait on a BART train during a systemwide outage on May 9, 2025. (KRON4 / Will Tran)"Today was a major wake-up call for the Bay Area. For one morning, we saw what a future without transit looks like. And it was ugly," said Cyrus Hall, a San Francisco transit advocate. "People were stuck in gridlock, couldn’t get to work, or they were forced to pay 10 to 20 times more for a rideshare."
Senators Jesse Arreguin (D-Berkeley) and Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) are co-leading an effort that's pushing for $2 billion to be allocated in the state budget for funding public transit agencies statewide.
The senators wrote, "The temporary outage provided a window into what life in the Bay Area will be like without robust BART service. This temporary headache could become a nightmarish new reality if nothing is done to address the financial crisis facing BART and other transit systems. Governor Newsom and the Legislature must secure additional funding for public transportation in this year’s budget to prevent major service cuts in the short term."
BART says $35M deficit eliminated, long term funding remains a mysteryBART issued its first advisory at 4:30 a.m. Friday alerting the public that service was suspended systemwide until further notice.
Partial service resumed around 8:30 a.m., and full services were up and running by 9:30 a.m. BART officials warned that on Friday afternoon there could be delays of up to 20 minutes as the system recovers from earlier problems.
Riders wait on a BART station platform during a systemwide outage on May 9, 2025. (KRON4 / Will Tran)BART's spokesperson explained what caused the outage and how the decision to halt trains was made. Operations Control Center crews were unable to visually see parts of the tracks because of a computer network issue.
Trost said, "Certain sections of tracks were showing and then not showing, and then showing and then not showing. And so we can't have that. Obviously."
BART's spokesperson emphasized that Friday's outage was not caused by problems with training nor aging equipment.
"This is part of a very, large, complex computer network system. All of our computer systems are quite new. They were not communicating properly with each other, so (the problem) was intermittent visibility for our control center. We have thousands, literally thousands of these devices. Crews were able to see the exact section that needed to be disconnected. So once that was disconnected, we were able to see everything we needed to see and safely dispatch trains," Trost explained.
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