Full Service Expected Today Following Crippling Shutdown, BART Says

Regular service is expected to resume today, Tuesday, after central computer problems caused a major interruption of BART service lasting more than two hours last night, Monday, BART said.

Delays began about 7:35 p.m. because of computer problems in BART's Operations Control Center, and service was shut down, BART said. "Very limited" service controlled by radio dispatch began around 8:40 p.m., according to BART.

“I’ve been riding since BART first opened and nothing like this has ever occurred,” said Bill Pinkham, after he pulled up to the del Norte station in El Cerrito last night on his bicycle. He had planned to board BART at the Richmond station, but finding no trains running there had ridden to del Norte in hopes of catching a train there instead, in vain as it turned out.

Passengers stranded throughout the Bay Area endured long waits or were obliged find other means of transportation.

Late last night, BART offered a brief explanation of the problem:

"The monitoring system that allows managers to view train movement was not functioning, and a preliminary review revealed that a router problem was preventing operational data from reaching the monitoring system."

During the shutdown, BART patrons were urged to find alternative transportation. A mutual aid agreement allowed customers to show their BART tickets to board AC Transit and Muni, BART said.

The last time BART experienced a shutdown of a similar scale was during an outage that impacted an evening commute on March 29, 2006, but that breakdown was fixed within 70 minutes, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.