BART Issues Rare Public Apology Following Service Meltdowns

The BART Board of Directors issued a public apology Thursday after two recent major service disruptions that left one of the Bay Area’s most expansive transit agencies paralyzed and stranded hundreds of thousands of riders across the region. During the regular board meeting, BART staff broke down the mechanical and human errors that led to the suspension of service in the last two weeks and how the agency could learn from both cases while investigations continue. On Aug. 29, a train traveling from San Francisco to Dublin stopped inside the Transbay Tube after an insulator between the track and electric third rail caused smoke just before the train arrived at the West Oakland station. According to manager of operations Shane Edwards, a second train, traveling from San Francisco to Antioch, stopped just after leaving the Embarcadero station, resulting in two trains with passengers remaining inside the tunnel. The cause of the blown insulator is still under investigation, but directors asked staff members to implement better protocols for communication between passengers and train operators. “I want to issue a public apology. It’s unthinkable to be trapped in the Transbay Tube in a car that’s stopped and filling with smoke,” said BART Director Robert Raburn. “This cannot and should not be the norm that every few months we say, ‘I’m really sorry, this is unacceptable,'” said Director Janice Li. “We’ll do better, given the moment we’re in and the existential crisis that we’re facing. These instances further threaten public trust in us.”

A week later, last Friday, an overnight computer upgrade project meant to phase out outdated equipment led to an unexpected network malfunction across the system. Sylvia Lamb is the assistant general manager in charge of infrastructure upgrades across the BART system and took personal responsibility for the systemwide meltdown. “This event was my responsibility and avoidable,” said Lamb when providing her report to the board. “We underestimated risk and impact of this risk. There is no one that feels worse about this than myself and my team.” The preventative maintenance was being conducted at the Montgomery station in San Francisco. BART and a contracted team physically moved fiber optic cabling from the old equipment to new ones. After initial signals that the system was malfunctioning, Lamb and her team worked to find the cause, eventually reverting to the old equipment and restarting the erroneous devices.

In retrospect, Lamb said the team overlooked the possibility to isolate the west and east branches of the system earlier so service in the East Bay could have restarted sooner. According to Lamb, eight similar switches had already been made without incident, but 41 more stations needed replacements. Director Victor Flores asked if it was possible for equipment to be replaced in batches rather than individually to possibly contain future errors, to which staff said they would be weighing that option. Going forward, the infrastructure upgrade team will be conducting upgrades on weekends between Saturday and Sunday to ensure that if any problems arise, it won’t be during the work week. Promises were also made to reevaluate preventative measures to stop such an incident from occurring again. The service disruptions tarnished a positive trajectory for BART, which had seen a record-low number of disruptions in June as compared to the start of the year and ridership being up 10 percent since last year. BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said an estimated 44,000 trips were impacted and over $200,000 in possible fare revenue was lost during last Friday’s disruption. While modernization upgrades to BART are necessary for the continued operation of the system, the public and Board of Directors are hoping the lessons learned from these two recent incidents will prevent similar ones from occurring.