A Friday morning outage across the Bay Area’s only rapid transit agency caused chaos for commuters, leaving tens of thousands of people to find other ways to work.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency sees around 150,000 riders on any given Friday; it’s a figure that’s continuing to grow with increased office days becoming a norm amongst companies that adopted remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. But as more people continue relying on BART to get to and from work, as well as go about their daily lives, budget shortages of between $350 and $400 cast a surly shadow on the rapid transit agency’s future.
Service lines and times are being cut. Repairs continue taking rank order in regards to their severity, these issues being addressed individually, instead of as a collective. Some stations still have closed bathrooms. General rider safety and train conditions, though improving, are sluggish to climb.
On Friday, May 9th, a small window into a BART-less future was shown after an hours-long systemwide shutdown brought the entire agency’s train fleet to a standstill, leaving riders to adopt other ways of getting to work.
BART shared across its social media platforms that service was delayed by four hours on Friday morning due to a perceived “computer networking problem,” which sent crews scrambling to fix the issue amid pressure from passengers needing to get home, work, and to the airport. (The New York Times found the situation newsworthy enough to highlight on their morning front page.)
The agency noted that all BART trains resumed service at 9:15 a.m., but the hours-long delays had already done their damage.
Traffic on the Bay Bridge came to a standstill. Downtown San Francisco was a chorus of honks, swear words thrown out open driver-side windows. Bike lanes and crosswalks were occasionally blocked by cars. Pandemonium was present at virtually every parking garage in downtown San Francisco and Oakland, with valets directing drivers away — “we’re at capacity” was the line most shouted by parking garage staff.
What ultimately transpired (shown through grinding teeth) was the culmination of our country’s car-centric culture (and policy making) colliding with the nation’s de-emphasis on bolstering public transit networks.
It was the perfect storm for public transit advocates to wave quickly made signage to remind drivers of a future sans BART.
“During the BART systemwide closure this morning, transit advocates took to some freeway exits in S.F. to tell drivers stuck in gridlock that this could be the norm if the state does not fund transit,” reads a post on X by Jerold Chinn, a freelance writer who focuses on public transportation and urbansim coverage. Attached to the post was an all too poignant picture: presumably one of those public transit advocates holding a sign that read “THIS IS TRAFFIC WITHOUT BART.”
By Friday evening, the exact reason for the systemwide outage was shared; BART Spokesperson Alicia Trost told media outlets that BART wasn’t able to power up its control system — a network of computers, each one made up of thousands of devices like routers and switches, which keep the trains on track and operators in control — for reasons that are still being investigation. BART has reassured that the issues weren’t a result of the agency’s recent decades-in-the-making technology upgrade, which modernized the network and literally moved it away from floppy disks.
Whatever the reason behind the Friday morning BART outage, today made it clear that a future without rapid transit is one riddled with even more road rage.
Feature Image: Courtesy of X via [at]Jerold_Chinn
