A pair of Bay Area state lawmakers along with various transit advocates are calling for more investment in public transportation systems after BART’s regionwide service meltdown Friday morning. In a joint statement, state Sens. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Jesse Arreguín, D-Berkeley, said BART’s roughly four-hour systemwide service outage was “a window into what life in the Bay Area will be like without robust BART service.” The system carries about 170,000 passengers on a typical weekday, according to the pair, and Friday’s service disruption during the height of the morning commute led to major traffic impacts on the region’s freeways. It also forced other transit agencies, including Alameda-Contra Costa Transit and the San Francisco Bay Ferry system, to add more buses and bigger boats to their service schedules to accommodate desperate commuters.
Additionally, ride-hailing service companies implemented surge pricing — higher prices during peak periods of demand — while the fiasco unfolded and people scrambled to find alternative ways to work. The BART system collapse was caused by “network devices having intermittent connectivity,” which meant that workers in the agency’s Operations Control Center couldn’t track train positions, a necessity for safe operations, according to BART officials. Wiener and Arreguín used Friday morning’s chaos to advocate for their efforts to earmark $2 billion in the state budget for transit statewide. “This outage showed once again how essential BART — and transit generally — is to life in the Bay Area,” according to the state senators’ joint statement. “Everyone suffers when we lose robust public transportation service: our roads rapidly become choked with traffic, workers are unable to make it to work, children miss their rides to school, and businesses lose customers.”
A group of transit activists echoed the lawmakers’ plea Friday, saying that if BART’s budget isn’t shored up, the agency could cut its number of daily train trips from 4,200 to just 500. Currently, BART is projecting ongoing structural deficits of between $350 million and $400 million per year beginning in fiscal year 2027. “If left unfunded, BART will be forced to reduce service to one train per hour and cut entire lines,” said Dylan Fabris of the advocacy group San Francisco Transit Riders. “Muni will see 30 percent service cuts, and other agencies like AC Transit, Caltrain, and Golden Gate Transit will also need to cut service.” On Friday afternoon, BART general manager Robert Powers issued an apology for the disruption. “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,” Powers said. “We will learn from this incident and are committed to continuous improvement.”
“Weiner Unzips!”
LOL!
BART breaks down ………..”More money! We need more MONEY!”
BOHICA!
If Weiner likes it, zipped or unzipped, I’m against it.
How many people think this was a staged event to lobby for more money?
“We will learn from…we are committed…”blah blah blah.
And they can’t whip it by being soft.
The solution is always the same, with the current “ruling” group: more public funding, and a good portion from those who do not use BART.
Now that’s a headline.
The risque title is funny till it gets to the name of a fractured wiener.
Anything Weiner says I’m going the other way ….. can we get rid of him at the same time as Newscum? all they know how to say is more taxpayer money please
Exactly!
Never let a crisis go to waste….
Given age of system . . . . . . bart needs to watch out on system for
ELDER ABUSE.
.
Everyone who thinks outage and weiner happening,
were mere coincidences, raise your mouse.
.
Ya, . . . . . thought so.
.
How many people, did guys on graveyard shift have to have to call in
to figure out the problem ? ? ? Or did a squirrel or rat chew into cabling ?
.
Watch, they’ll redo their train schedules, add more time between trains.
They’ll be baffled when ridership drops, and repeat . . . . .
.
The poster campaign regarding behavior on trains,
could well be a response to a drop in ridership.
The state democrat politicians calling for more investment in public transportation? Look what a phenomenal job they’ve done with pretty much any and all other transportation issues.
p.s. How’s that Bullet Train thing working out for everyone?
Mort DeSourair should immediately have one his town hall meetings to address the issue.
No new funding without firing a few BART managers, changes in BART leader personnel, and, most importantly, very specific delineation of where each and every tax dollar will be and is spent with unchangeable rules that the money cannot be diverted elsewhere. The delineation of spending cannot be vague or overbroad but must be a line item agenda that shows every dollar from one single screw to maintain tracks to highest paid salary. Wiener started working for Gavin Newsom over 20 years ago and has held some sort of paid or elected position since then – unless you are completely clueless, a history of 20 years of the same and growing problems means he has no capability of changing or improving anything in California, especially BART.
This seems like something Buttigieg would really get behind.
He needs to take a stern approach.