At the 16th Street-Sission Station, a worker announcing the closure to the runners said that computer failure had even disrupted the agency’s communications and left employees unable to light up.
On the other side of the mission district, Ian Rice arrived at the 24th Street station shortly after 7 am to take Bart to his downtown office.
“It is the first I hear about this,” he told a Kqed journalist after finding the prices of the prices at the underground entrance to the closed station. Above the ground, no signaling warned that the trains below were interrupted. “I planned to go upstairs and see if I could perhaps take the 22 (Fillmore), take the bus. We will see what is available, but it will be a problem. ”
He was part of the crowd of driving shutters – and quickly from the station during the busy morning trip.
Luna Pantera arrived at the same station around 7:15 am to take a train for the car that she was supposed to pick up before work. She said the closure meant a 20 -minute delay and a more expensive journey.
“I’m going to have to take a Uber that I really can’t afford, so I’m not very happy at the moment,” she said.
Pantera told Kqed that it was not the first time that Bart was crushed.
“These are either the mechanical stairs or the trains are dirty, and we always increase prices,” she said. “It would have been good to obtain an alert at the system scale. I did not have one, and I bartesed on my (phone), so I could have made other arrangements.
“It’s just not practical, and I think Bart must do much better.”
The agency has increased prices twice in the past two years, increasing the price of an average journey by 11% since 2023, because it faces a “tax cliff”.
Like other transit systems in the bay region, Bart struggled to bounce back after the Covid-19 pandemic while more and more commuters have moved to remote work. The agency recently announced $ 35 million in budget decreases and cost control to balance its books for 2025, but its deficit should flow to $ 400 million by 2027.
“The Bay region has the highest home work rates in the country and the slowest recovery in the city center,” the agency said in a statement on its website. “This has created a continuous structural financial deficit, which had an impact on Bart’s long -term capacity to provide high quality public transportation service on which the Bay region is based.”
It is warned that without changes in its financing, there could be disastrous consequences, such as the line cutting, the closing stations earlier in the night and even the end of the weekend service.
In March, State Sens. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco and Jesse Arreguín, D-Berkeley, presented a bill which would put a measure of sales tax on the 2026 ballot in certain counties in the Bay region intended to finance the daily transport operations.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission estimated that the tax could increase approximately $ 440 million per year, depending on the tax rate and the counties included.
Supporters of this measure took the major disruption on Friday as an opportunity to remind residents of the Bay region, which is at stake if Bart and other transit agencies are boiled under financial tension.
“Without sufficient funding, these types of problems will get worse,” said the Cyrus Hall transport activist, standing with a crowd holding pro-bart panels and fitted on the interstate 80 exit ramp in the west on rue Fremont around 10:30 am, “Bart has been running on a shoestring for years, and we have to solve this problem now.”
Hall said that even if the legislators were taking voter measurement in 2026, Bart will need funding to repair gaps until then. Arreguín has also asked Governor Gavin Newsom to allocate $ 2 billion in public funds to transit systems across the State in the next two years. The governor’s revised budget is scheduled for this month.
Without both voting and stopping money, Hall said that the system could be in danger.
“We are considering service cuts before even arriving at the ballot,” Hall told Kqed. “And it would be really devastating from the point of view of public support.”
The reduction in hours at the end of the evening or weekend and to direct less trains means longer journeys and more road traffic for drivers.
“Traffic was horrible,” shouted a driver through his car window, slowing down in traffic crawling off the bay bridge.
“This is really our last moment when we can really save public transport and not see a decline of decline before we can start rebuilding,” said Hall.
Brian Watt of Kqed, Ethan Toven-Lindsey, Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman and Juan Carlos Lara contributed to this report.
