Latest news with #AliciaTrost
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
BART rep. addresses last Friday's systemwide shutdown, financial challenges
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — BART experienced a system shutdown last Friday morning, leaving commuters stranded for several hours due to a communication failure between devices. The shutdown lasted for four hours, affecting service across the Bay Area. BART officials have identified the devices involved and are investigating why redundant systems failed to prevent the outage. 'We've identified what devices were involved with the problem,' said BART Communications Director, Alicia Trost, noting that the equipment was not old but failed to communicate correctly. Bay Area rapper Ruby Ibarra wins NPR Tiny Desk Contest The incident has put a spotlight on the importance of transit systems and the need for coordination with other agencies, such as ferries and buses, to provide alternative routes for commuters. BART is currently facing a significant financial challenge, with a projected $379 million deficit due to decreased ridership. While most riders have returned, they are traveling less frequently, impacting revenue. New fare gates are being installed at BART stations, aimed at reducing fare evasion and crime. Preliminary data suggests these gates are effective, with reports of decreased fare evasion and increased ridership. (Watch the full interview in the player above) All facts from this article were gathered by KRON4 journalists. The article was converted into this format with assistance from artificial intelligence. It has been edited and approved by KRON4 staff. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
BART outage sparks push for transit funding as service resumes
The Brief BART service resumed Saturday after a major outage Friday morning halted all trains and disrupted thousands of commutes. The breakdown sparked renewed calls from lawmakers and transit advocates for long-term funding to support BART and the broader Bay Area transit network. DALY CITY, Calif. - BART service resumed Saturday after a systemwide outage on Friday stranded thousands of commuters and reignited calls from lawmakers and riders for increased investment in public transit. The disruption, caused by a failure in the system that powers BART's train control operations, shut down service at all stations for several hours during the peak of the morning commute. Trains began running again around 9 a.m., but delays persisted. Dipasa Ghimire, who relies on BART to get to her store in San Francisco, said the outage threw off her entire morning. "When I was here, I'm surprised, because no BART, and then I'm hurry because at a.m., I have to open my store, and then I booked a taxi, but it takes 20 minutes to come," Ghimire said. BART officials said the incident highlights the urgent need to fund not only its own operations, but also support services like buses and ferries that could help absorb rider overflow during major disruptions. "Right now, it's critical that we show the Bay Area that they don't need to drive," said BART spokesperson Alicia Trost. "We have a ridership of about 200,000 exits a day and what I think is a really great story is, for those ferries and buses, we made those phone calls this morning, please scale up." The outage comes amid a looming budget crisis for BART. Officials have warned of possible service reductions unless new sources of long-term funding are secured. "If we do nothing, we're going to see massive service cuts at BART, elimination of an entire line or two, closure of stations, scaling back or elimination of evening or weekend service and that means horrible traffic for the Bay Area," said State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). Wiener said he is working to authorize a regional sales tax measure that could provide long-term financial support for transit systems across the Bay Area. Some riders say the system is already unreliable, and in need of major improvements. "I rely on it because that's my only commute. I catch a bus, and I transfer and there's constantly something going on other than what happened yesterday. There's delays, there's medical emergencies... we're lucky to have it, but I think we need to improve it," said Milana Buzzoni of Daly City. Others said the outage may be a push for people to find other ways to get around. "Get up off their butt, start doing more walking. Maybe you stop getting on this and you start doing more working and exercising and you'll live a little longer," Patricio Richardoe said. On Friday, public transit advocates rallied at a congested freeway off-ramp in San Francisco, holding signs that read "Fund Transit" and "BART Outage = More Traffic." They say the outage should serve as a wake-up call about the region's growing dependence on a strained and underfunded system.
See - Sada Elbalad
11-05-2025
- Business
- See - Sada Elbalad
Train Network "BART" Outage Paralyzes Traffic in San Francisco
Taarek Refaat San Francisco experienced a near-total disruption to public transportation on Friday after a sudden stoppage on its major public transit system, disrupting all BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) trains serving the Bay Area and causing widespread chaos during the morning rush hour. BART announced on its website: "Due to a computer network issue, BART services are suspended systemwide until further notice. Please seek alternative transportation." The shutdown forced tens of thousands of commuters to seek alternative ways to get to work, with images showing heavy traffic on buses and reports of traffic jams on the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay Bridges, vital routes connecting the city to its suburbs. BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost told ABC7 that the problem appears to be related to the system's operation after overnight maintenance, ruling out a cyberattack at this time. The San Francisco train outage coincides with another outage that hit busy Newark Airport, one of three major airports serving the greater New York area. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said a communications failure affected the Philadelphia Air Traffic Control Center, temporarily disrupting radar and aircraft communications over Newark. The failure occurred at 3:55 a.m. and lasted only about 90 seconds, according to a brief official statement. read more CBE: Deposits in Local Currency Hit EGP 5.25 Trillion Morocco Plans to Spend $1 Billion to Mitigate Drought Effect Gov't Approves Final Version of State Ownership Policy Document Egypt's Economy Expected to Grow 5% by the end of 2022/23- Minister Qatar Agrees to Supply Germany with LNG for 15 Years Business Oil Prices Descend amid Anticipation of Additional US Strategic Petroleum Reserves Business Suez Canal Records $704 Million, Historically Highest Monthly Revenue Business Egypt's Stock Exchange Earns EGP 4.9 Billion on Tuesday Business Wheat delivery season commences on April 15 News Egypt confirms denial of airspace access to US B-52 bombers Lifestyle Pistachio and Raspberry Cheesecake Domes Recipe News Ayat Khaddoura's Final Video Captures Bombardment of Beit Lahia News Australia Fines Telegram $600,000 Over Terrorism, Child Abuse Content Arts & Culture Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's $4.7M LA Home Burglarized Sports Former Al Zamalek Player Ibrahim Shika Passes away after Long Battle with Cancer Videos & Features Bouchra Dahlab Crowned Miss Arab World 2025 .. Reem Ganzoury Wins Miss Arab Africa Title (VIDEO) Sports Neymar Announced for Brazil's Preliminary List for 2026 FIFA World Cup Qualifiers News Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly Inaugurates Two Indian Companies Arts & Culture New Archaeological Discovery from 26th Dynasty Uncovered in Karnak Temple
San Francisco Chronicle
09-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Here's why BART shut down for hours, and why it has people thinking about the agency's future
BART had barely restored service, after an hours-long meltdown on Friday, when the politics and damage control began. 'The temporary outage provided a window into what life in the Bay Area will be like without robust BART service,' state Senators Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Jesse Arreguin, D-Berkeley, said in a joint statement to convey the urgency of funding transit. Like other agencies, BART will soon face a deficit of up to $400 million a year, which would almost certainly send the rail system into a death spiral. But as civic leaders touted the importance of BART, officials at the agency scrambled to reassure the public that their infrastructure is not about to break down. A decade-long project to install a new train control system is currently underway. Engineers say that once it's complete, BART could vastly increase its capacity and become more reliable. Besides, they say, Friday was an isolated malfunction that no one could have predicted. Staff at BART, and their political allies, have a somewhat complex message for the public, a dance of eliciting empathy and managing image. BART needs money, but it's not deteriorating. Major revitalization is just around the corner. The service freeze on Friday was an outlier. Spokespeople described the 'root cause' of the outage as minute and specific, akin to a tiny flaw on a piece of connective tissue. They explained in a statement that two network devices were intermittently failing to communicate. As a result, engineers at the Operations Control Center 'lacked the visibility of the track circuits and the train positions necessary for safe operations.' When BART engineers detected the glitch on what they said was a 'redundant' section of the network, they disconnected it, enabling passenger service to restart. Think of it as a large-scale version of your Internet router crashing. 'Everything has to be working perfectly,' for trains to run smoothly and deliver 170,000 commuters throughout the Bay Area, spokesperson Alicia Trost said. How the public will receive that message depends, in part, on whether BART commuters have memory-holed an uncannily similar outage that occurred in 2019. In that instance, a network switch broke, halting trains for hours on a Saturday morning. At the time, the agency's general manager of operations promised a suite of upgrades to prevent a repeat. Over the next five years BART overhauled its computer hardware and software. The agency also used federal funding to build a network disaster recovery data center. 'Lessons learned' from the 2019 episode helped quickly resolve the situation on Friday, BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said. Yet the real technology fix — a modern control system to update the 1960s equipment at BART's core — might reach the finish line just as the rail agency enters a financial crisis. The transit agency anticipates a funding gap of $300 to $400 million a year once federal and state emergency funding runs out. It could translate into service cuts so deep that BART would close stations and only run trains once an hour. If that happens, it would undercut the restoration work that's finally begun, after years of planning and discussion. Officials at the transit agency acknowledged that quandary as they conducted a post-mortem Friday afternoon, by which point trains were running throughout the Bay Area. Transit activists, meanwhile, gathered at a freeway off-ramp in San Francisco to protest what they see as a dearth of funding, 'which leads directly to the sort of outages BART had this morning,' said one of the organizers, Cyrus Hall. 'This was really a snap decision,' Hall said, adding that he had planned to go rock climbing when a friend called to say BART was out and it was time to make a point. 'We made the signs,' Hall said, 'and we rushed downtown.' Wiener and Arreguin are pressing for a transit sales tax measure next year that would also include some accountability measures for the agencies. The idea is to deliver consistent service and build public trust. Hours-long breakdowns will neither be routine, nor expected. 'I want to understand what caused (the breakdown), but I also want to understand what does getting around the Bay Area look like without BART,' Wright said. 'Because that's a real question we're having to contend with in the coming year.' In that sense, Friday served as a harbinger.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Yahoo
San Francisco trains hit by systemwide outage
San Francisco's main public transport system abruptly shut down Friday morning, stopping all trains in the Bay Area and throwing the morning commute into chaos. "Due to a computer networking problem BART service is suspended system wide until further notice," said a message on the Bay Area Rapid Transit website. "Seek alternate means of transport." The shutdown left tens of thousands of commuters scrambling to find other ways to work. Pictures showed crowds of people pressing aboard buses, while reports said both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland Bay Bridge -- key routes into and out of the city -- were clogged. Unlike many major US cities, San Francisco has a well developed public transport network that includes an underground train network, buses, trams and ferries that traverse the bay between San Francisco and other cities in the region. The closure of the BART train system, whose 131 miles (210 kilometres) of track carry more than 174,000 passengers every day, appeared to be related to how the system had powered up after overnight maintenance, communications officer Alicia Trost told ABC7. There was no immediate indication that the problems had been the result of a cyberattack, she said. The halt caused misery for those trying to get to work. David Meland told the San Francisco Chronicle he had waited in vain outside his local station for an hour to see if the service would resume. "It's happened a lot. BART's just too inconsistent," he said. "This is pretty bad." Patrick Dunn, who had driven to an exurban station to ride into the city said he was going to have to switch transport. "Now I have to take the bus, and I never take the bus," he told the Chronicle. "I already have a long commute and now I have to wait for the (bus). I'll be late by an half hour or so." The shutdown came on the day that the overstretched airport in Newark, one of three serving greater New York, also suffered an outage -- the second in the last few weeks. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said there "was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display" at the same Philadelphia traffic control station that guides aircraft in and out of Newark's airspace. The outage occurred around 03:55 (07:55 GMT) on Friday and "lasted approximately 90 seconds," a short statement said. hg/bgs
