No information as to the actual cause right now. Easy to speculate that it's a cyberattack, but I'm going to go for the free square and wildly guess it is a DNS issue.
Best wishes and godspeed to the folks who are working on fixing the issue, whatever it is.
The ports are used as hard realtime GPIO so if some of the electrical isolation failed downstream, it could take out the motherboard. Back before Vista’s security model change, drivers could fill DMA buffers to the parallel ports controller and get hard realtime time outputs on Windows so there’s a quite lot of old industrial control systems running on a thread.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-...
The last time I experienced a BART shutdown, the cause was that someone had found a box in one of the stations somewhere, and they (1) assumed it was a bomb; and (2) shut down the entire system. I'm not sure what stopping the trains while you investigate the bomb you've found accomplishes, but I don't think there were efforts to find additional bombs. (The box was not actually a bomb.)
It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably.
This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular.
Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.
It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.
The last time in recent memory there was a large BART disruption it had been caused by a motorcyclist who somehow flung himself over a fence into the trackway and died. That stopped service in and north of Oakland, which is more than half of the system by riders.
It doesn't seem likely to be a physical obstruction on the tracks, though, as the entire system is down and trains aren't running anywhere. I don't know if that's happened before.
Loud explosions happen all the time in SF. Particularly in the Lower Nob Hill / Tenderloin area.
I lived an Lower Nob Hill for many years and heard countless explosions, most often in the middle of the night (2am-4am) or early hours (6am). Often times these explosions M80s-M1000s being dropped and detonated.
Someone was arrested back in 2019 and the explosions reduced dramatically.
This article[0] goes into detail about it.
[0]: https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythica...
From the article: "Once the crews isolated that exact section that had the devices that were not properly communicating to each other, they were able to just simply disconnect them,” she told KQED. “That is what allowed us to finally get service back up and running.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bart-shut-down-t... (https://archive.ph/LnvJ1)
https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/09/bart-service-shuts-down-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/bart-train-shutdown.ht... (https://web.archive.org/web/20250509152319/https://www.nytim...)
https://abc7news.com/post/systemwide-bart-shutdown-due-train...
The main problem which BART cannot fix is that the trains usually don't go to where you want to go.
I think this is overstated, at least from an operations point of view. My mom has been using BART to commute to work for over a year and I can't recall many incidents like this.
They're still working on this, with four more stations planned beyond Berryessa (Little Portugal, Downtown San José, Diridon, and Santa Clara), plus an additional infill station on the Berryessa line. I think that would be really cool. Unfortunately it looks like this new extension won't be that competitive with Caltrain as a way to get to San Jose from San Francisco. Maybe at non-express times.
Also, it looks like it won't be complete until 2040!?
Plus: Oakland is actually building homes for people while SF remains laughably behind on building quotas.
Of course most of Silicon Valley is closer to the San Francisco - Santa Cruz line, making the ferry service redundant.
It’s too bad they ripped all this stuff out, and will never rebuild it!
It's called an "excursion fare", which is meant for those that just ride the train without getting off and come back to the same station. You can talk to a BART station agent (assuming you can find one) and they'll let you out, or call customer service and they'll reverse the charge.
Modern fare systems should be able to figure out when you've exited right after entering and not charge you. BART is supposed to be adding a 30 minute grace period so if you go in and out of the station within 30 minutes, you won't be charged.
There was a study done on this. It turns out that the median income of someone riding under the Bay Bridge in BART is higher than someone driving a car across it.
In other words the wealthier people are using BART. So if you made it free, you'd be subsidizing the wealthy.
>The root cause of the disruption was related to network devices having intermittent connectivity. Staff in the Operations Control Center lacked the visibility of the track circuits and the train positions necessary for safe operations. Visibility of this system in the Operations Control Center is required to run service.
> 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.
How about fix the country public transport first instead of spending 2 Trillion on BS AI?
That is because those are inconvenient, slow but necessary amenities in the areas where most people are poor. And that is why US currently doesn't need either.
Source: lived in a poor country with exceptional public transit and didn't ever drive till 29; and carried water with buckets from a well only a block away for an aggregate of 1-2 years.
That's worth a screenshot.
Any idea whether the political and technical will is there, to post-mortem this, and make the system more robust and resilient?
Should it not be "they were able to just simply reconnect them"?
Surprise to see no exact problem been given in the article and comments section. Curious to see is it a legit computer networking problem, and if yes what they actually were? Could they install a proper fail over connection to prevent the outage in the first place?
The last time I had a long car commute, it was 45-60 minutes driving, or 2+ hours via various transit options, so driving was unfortunately the only reasonable choice. But 20 minutes extra to avoid driving? I'd do that in a heartbeat.
(Hell, I do that often enough just inside SF, taking a bus or train instead of an Uber/Lyft or driving myself... sadly it's not uncommon for a 15-minute car ride to be the equivalent of a 40 minute transit ride.)
Every day the last week at my station there are piles of commuters held up by the semi-broken scanners. Kudos to the front line staff down there apologizing. I am not holding my breath it’ll be fixed anytime soon.
It does not actually run the transaction through the entire way - if a transaction fails, the card info gets placed on a blacklist and that particular NFC device won't receive an instant authorisation next time. Generally speaking, people don't have an easy way to generate lots and lots of fake NFC devices, so this hasn't been a problem for widespread fraud (vs just jumping over the turnstile).
The killer feature that also causes most of the quirks is that it can be used to make payments fully offline without allowing double-spending of balance. This is of course mostly a killer feature for transit operators rather than users. OMNY solves the same problem by just accepting that it'll occasionally permit free rides.
This is generally true for active fare enforcement, since you have to pay employees to do enforcement, there's appeals processes, and some people just don't pay the fine.
If the new faregates result in some more people (lets say 1%!) paying for trips (less freeriding), that's directly 1-2 million per year. If they also increase real-ridership, that's additional income. To make the cost back quickly you do need a significant increase (10-15%), that's not totally out of the question, though it's probably not only due to faregates.
My personal observations are really that California are just truly fucking terrible at this sort of thing. Ironic considering they are such a huge economy and so wealthy. In northern California PCH (pacific coast highway) has been closed for over 15 months due to a rockslide. In southern california, a huge segment of ACH (angeles crest highway, one of my favorite places on earth) has been closed since 2023! You cannot drive from one end of the range to the other at this time.
China would have fixed these issues in weeks. For all the cash and people they have, Cali really manages to drop the ball on these things constantly. Don't even get me started on high speed rail that was built out in the middle of buttfuck farmland from Madera to Shafter. Like a stairway to nowhere.
The Purple line has evolved into a financial disaster. It will be the most expensive train line ever constructed, $10 billion for a 16 mile segment.
BART ridership is 40% of what it was in 2019. There's no way you can lose 60% of your customers and not have major problems.
What is the purpose of public transit? Do you believe that public transit is designed so that poor people can commute to jobs?
Wrong. Public transit is designed so that people can go shopping. Buses and trains move people around to shopping centers and stores and malls.
It is only by accident that poor people can commute to some jobs with public transit. There are far, far more jobs that are more-or-less unreachable by bus or train, and poor people end up walking, cycling, or moving closer to those jobs.
When I was a young child, Grandma didn't drive, and so our weekends were consumed by walking around the neighborhood, shopping and eating in restaurants. We'd hang out at the 7-Eleven playing Centipede, Missile Command, and Asteroids. We'd pick up some sodas and Cracked magazine and go home.
Then later in life, we started going to malls. None of the malls were walking-distance from Grandma's house, so we rode the bus. And I fell in love with public transit; we'd ride the bus to any one of 3-4 malls nearby, walk around to our heart's content, and ride the bus back home carrying our spoils for the day. It was always a treat to do this.
What I definitely noticed was that a lot of poor people rode the bus. What I didn't realize is that mostly, they didn't have anywhere else to go. It wasn't a matter of commuting to their jobs, but just hanging out for the day.
Here in Phoenix, most bus stations are in shopping malls, or they become de facto shopping centers, and the light rail corridor is basically a commerce incubator by the way stores and shopping centers are popping up now that the track is permanently laid down.
On the weekends it may be common to see working-class Hispanic moms take their children to church on the free buses, but the free buses are intended to get tourists and residents into the shopping areas and/or connect them to the full-fare routes so that they can really do some hardcore "shop 'til you drop" activity.
In fact, the public transit sectors that are designed for commuting are the Express buses, which have a higher base fare and serve 9-5 white-collar office workers. It's transparently upper-crust. None of those Express routes can possibly help poor people get to poor-people jobs. Express buses get people into the city center so they don't need cars there: attorneys, civil servants, accountants, clerks. That's the Express system only. The rest of transit: shopping, shopping and more shopping.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/no-bart-trains-runnin...
BART doesn't automatically mean anything unless you are familiar with the region.
I lived 7 years in the US and still took a while (even after opening the linked article -- given the website was a local media outlet, there were no immediate clues in the article which country/state/city it is referring to)
I guess today those same people feel a level of validation on what they insisted.
The majority of times it's SSL.
But yes, public transit in the states is rather pathetic.
