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Updated May 22, 2025

On May 22, 2025, the BART Board of Directors were given updates about two service disruptions. The video is posted above. They talked about this incident as well as the incident on May 20, 2025 when an electrical fault started a fire near the San Leandro Station causing a major service outage in parts of the East Bay. 

Regular BART service resumed at around 9am this morning, Friday, May 9, following an earlier problem that prevented trains from being safely dispatched for passenger service, which typically takes place at 5am on weekdays. 

The root cause of the disruption was related to network devices having intermittent connectivity. Staff in the Operations Control Center lacked the visibility of the track circuits and the train positions necessary for safe operations. Visibility of this system in the Operations Control Center is required to run service.  

BART issued its first service advisory at 4:30am, alerting the public that BART service was suspended systemwide until further notice.   

BART’s Network Engineering team identified and isolated a redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it. This allowed service to begin. The East Bay section of the BART system began running passenger trains first, shortly before 9am, and systemwide service began just before 9:30am. 

During the period when there was no BART service, BART’s leadership sent extra staff who usually work at headquarters to stations across the system to alert people as they arrived that there was no BART service. Calls were made to bus agencies asking them to scale up their service as much as possible and to offer free rides from our stations. The San Francisco Bay Ferry deployed their larger vessels to help. BART General Manager Robert Powers was inside the Operations Control Center to receive rapid updates and monitor performance.  

“We apologize for the disruptive morning and not having train service to get people where they need to go,” said Powers. “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. We will learn from this incident and are committed to continuous improvement. We are grateful to our partner transit agencies who were able to help our riders this morning.” 

BART does not anticipate this issue further impacting service today. Crews will continue to investigate all related equipment and if equipment replacement or repairs are necessary.

Have yourself a BARTy little sweater – and vest and beanie and scarf. That’s right, we just kicked off the Railgoods.com BART Holiday Merch Pre-Sale, and this year, we have four brand new items to help you toast BART and the winter season. 

The heatwave’s over, the sweat on your brow has dried, your sunburn’s faded. It’s time to start shopping for knitwear. Get ‘em while it’s hot. 

Do you want to be sleighing in the Bay next winter? Preorder the new holiday goodies before this sled sails. The pre-sale is open on Railgoods.com now and will close July 31. Pre-sale items ship early November.

If you miss the pre-sale, we will have sweaters and other holiday merch on hand in late November, which you can order on Railgoods.com, buy at the Customer Services Center at Lake Merritt Station, or purchase at seasonal Railgoods pop-ups at events around the Bay Area, including SweaterFest 2024 (more details to come).  

You can also win holiday goodies from BARTable! Sign up for the BARTable This Week newsletter on bart.gov/bartable to be alerted when contests are running.  

BART holiday sweaters always sell out, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. Order now so you don’t have to DM us later asking if we can “strike up a deal.” We cannot.  

We will however give you a discount code. Use code 2024BARTholiday20 for $20 off holiday merch orders over $100 and 2024BARTholiday10 for $10 off holiday merch orders over $50. This is the first time we’ve offered discounts on holiday merch, and this is the lowest priced sweater we’ve ever sold (it’s also the least expensive holiday transit sweater in the Bay).  

Holiday merch prices (shipping costs vary by weight and distance): 

• Sweater - $49.99 (limited to 2 sweaters per order)  

• Vest - $39.99  

• Beanie - $15.99  

• Scarf - $19.99   

BART is at the heart of the Bay Area, and we should be proud of the public institutions that make our region merry and bright. Buy some merch and rep your love for BART and the Bay – the ugly sweater way. 

This is the fourth year BART has sold holiday sweaters. Last year, we sold our entire inventory of 3,000 sweaters. Sales exceeded $100,000.  

BART is one of the first transit agencies to sell holiday sweaters. We designed the first sweater in 2021 as a BARTable contest giveaway and ordered just five for the contests. Our inventory proved insufficient after General Manager Bob Powers wore one of the sweaters during a media event about BART’s air filters. People wanted them...badly. A week later, we held a sale for the public, and the sweaters sold out in under an hour.  

Every year since, despite increasing our inventory into the thousands, the sweaters have sold out.  

Thank you to this year's BART holiday merch models: Mag Tatum, Senior Board Analyst; Damya Belford, BART Communications Intern; and Oscar Brown, Principal Internal Auditor.

On Saturday, Oct. 12, BART will display a selection of garments created from retired paper tickets at BART Headquarters as part of Oakland Style Week. The outfits were created for BART’s Project Doneway fashion show, presented at Rockridge Station on September 14. 

The unique garments were designed by fashion students from Oakland School for the Arts, Academy of Art University, San Francisco State University, and City College of San Francisco. The students created their looks using more than 150,000 paper tickets collectively. BART retired the iconic tickets in 2023, and the fashion show provided an opportunity to reuse what would otherwise be shredded and recycled. Read more about Project Doneway and watch the show here.

BART invites the public to view the outfits on Saturday from noon to 5pm at our headquarters: 2150 Webster St., Oakland, just a few blocks from 19th St Oakland Station. The garments will be displayed in the front windows of the building on either side of the main entry doors, located at the top of the steps. There is an ADA-accessible ramp.  

Members of the public will not be able to enter the building, which is accessible only by key card on weekends and monitored by security. We ask that you please respect BART staff entering and exiting the building.  

What: Paper Ticket Dresses on Display 

Why: Oakland Style Week 

When: Saturday, Oct. 12, noon to 5pm  

Where: BART Headquarters, 2150 Webster St., Oakland 

Open House boards with more info on proposed Hayward TOD - English | Chinese | Spanish

Share your feedback - take the survey (closes 5/15/26)

BART is hosting a pair of community Open House events at Hayward Station to encourage riders and community members to share input and ideas for a potential Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). BART and the City of Hayward have been collaborating to lay the groundwork for selecting a developer for a transit-oriented, mixed-use, mixed-income development at Hayward Station. 

The Open Houses will be held on Wednesday, May 6, from 4:30pm to 6:30pm and Tuesday, May 12, from 7:30am to 9:30am at Hayward Station in the covered, unpaid concourse area (before you enter through the fare gates).  

BART is hosting the Open Houses to share information and receive feedback from the public on their priorities for the potential TOD. Members of the public are encouraged to drop by at any time during the Open Houses.  BART staff will be on hand to answer questions, and translation will be provided in Spanish and Chinese.  

The final goals and objectives for the development will be presented to the BART Board of Directors for approval and included in the developer solicitation. 

What is planned for Hayward Station? The project aims to bring housing for people of various income levels as well as ground floor commercial spaces and public amenities to the following three sites: 

1. A surface parking lot and driveway to the parking garage on the west side of the station. TOD will preserve and enhance access to the station and to the parking garage, which will remain in operation. 
2. A vacant lot on the north side of the station between A, B, and Montgomery streets.   
3. Passenger and bus loading areas and designated parking for people with disabilities, on the east side of the station. Should this third site be selected for development, the TOD will reconfigure the site to preserve loading areas and parking for people with disabilities. 

BART intends to begin looking for a developer after finalizing the goals and objectives. Once a developer is chosen they, along with BART and the City of Hayward, will continue to engage with BART riders, community members, and other stakeholders throughout the TOD design and permitting process. 

What if I can’t attend these Open Houses? You can review the Open House boards and provide your thoughts in an online survey (closes May 15, 2026). You may also sign up for the project email list to keep informed of future engagement opportunities by entering your information in the sign-up box below.

Questions? Email Principal Property Development Officer Shannon Dodge at [email protected].  

* denotes required field.

"Some people read, some people work, some people apply makeup,” says Joanna Sokua of riding BART. “I draw.”  

Since 2017, Sokua has been creating what she calls “BARToons” during her morning and evening commute. You might say she is a seasoned BARTist. In the past seven years, she has drawn more than 170 BART illustrations. While on the train, she snaps photos of scenes and passengers that spark an idea, and when she gets home, she’ll sketch them out or, most often, superimpose pop culture figures onto the images using a digital pen.  

The drawings depict Scooby Doo and Shaggy waiting for a train; Van Gough seated near the doors with a pipe and bandage over his ear; Doc Brown and Marty McFly from Back to the Future standing on a legacy train; Clark Kent looking at his phone with his Superman suit peeking out. Sometimes, she’ll just draw a passenger as they are, sitting on the train engrossed in whatever they’re doing. 

Sokua works in banking, helping small business owners secure financing for their ventures. She is one of many artists who have been inspired by their BART rides, from photographers roused by the system's striking angles to novelists who wrote their books almost entirely onboard. There have even been plays set on BART trains. 

On her BART ride from the East Bay to her office in San Francisco, Sokua is not thinking about her data-and-dollars day job. Mostly, she’s looking for subjects to draw. The creative exercise helps her unwind, and it’s deeply entertaining for those who keep up with her work on her Instagram (@the_und3rwrit3r), where she regularly posts her latest drawings.  

The artist said she doesn’t board a train with an idea for her next drawing. She simply waits for inspiration to strike. 

“People always ask me how I decide what to draw,” she said. “It just comes to me. I see something, and I know exactly what I want to do.” A drawing of Jack Sparrow was born after seeing a fellow rider in a headband on her train, for example.  

BART proves ripe for inspiration because “you see people from all walks of life,” Sokua said. She’s even made friends onboard.  

“I take the same train every day at the same time. You see the same people over and over,” she said. “It becomes a sort of community actually." 

Most of the time, people don’t know Sokua has used them for a drawing, though sometimes they find themselves or their loved ones on her Instagram page. One memorable instance was when she drew a man who “looked like Jesus” sitting next to a woman praying over a rosary. It's one of her favorite drawings, least of all because the man’s wife saw the drawing on Instagram and commented, “That’s my personal Jesus!” Once, she drew an Oscar the Grouch cartoon, and the person operating the train found the image on Facebook, commenting something to the effect of, “Hey! I was operating that train!”  

Sokua said she creates her BARToons to “make people laugh and make their rides more fun.”  

She doesn’t want to offend with her drawings, she just thinks everyone can always use a healthy dash of humor in their day.  

“You might as well make the most of your commute,” she said, adding that she “100% recommends” doodling on BART.

BART’s efforts to enhance safety, cleanliness, and the customer experience are paying off as June 2025 saw a 13.4% increase in ridership over a year ago, bolstered by steadily growing weekend ridership.

Saturdays have seen some of the highest rates of ridership growth as people increasingly use the system to travel to events and activities on the weekends, including families and those who are now choosing to take transit over driving. Saturday ridership increased by 15.2% from May to June and was up 24.6% compared to a year ago. These increases were boosted thanks to local events, such as the June 14 “No Kings Day” protests, which marked the second highest day for Saturday ridership since the pandemic. June 29, the day of the San Francisco Pride Parade, saw the second highest Sunday for ridership since 2020. 

Additional ridership information is publicly available here.

While ridership continues to recover from post-pandemic declines due to remote work, these numbers demonstrate the effectiveness of BART’s Safe and Clean Plan, a series of strategic initiatives and investments that have doubled the rate of deep cleaning and resulted in a surge in BART PD’s visible safety presence on trains and in stations.  

These improvements are happening in concurrence with customer experience improvements, including running only new Fleet of the Future trains and system hardening efforts, led by the ongoing installation of its Next Generation Fare Gates. 

BART has also been strategically promoting non-work trips by partnering with local sports teams and organizations; sharing Rider Guides and social media videos describing how to take transit to events; and promoting non-work trips through efforts such as the BARTable website and newsletter. BART’s Fun Stuff program is an engagement effort that aims to educate riders, help us connect with the communities we serve, and build brand affinity, especially with younger riders. Our programs are getting people excited about transit and emphasizing the many places our system can take them.

Effective Monday, October 5, 2026, Customer Services operating hours will change to streamline operations and provide more consistent service hours. 

The BART Customer Services Center @ Lake Merritt Station will now be open until 5:00pm. 

The new hours are:

Monday- Friday: 8:30 AM- 5:00 PM
1st week of the month: 8:30 AM- 6:00 PM (pilot extended hours)
3rd Wednesday of the month: 8:30 AM- 12:00 PM (early closure for operational needs)

Closed for all observed holidays

The Customer Services Office, where riders can call in with comments, inquires, concerns, praises, or to report a maintenance issue, will now follow the same 8:30 AM- 5:00 PM to schedule as the Customer Services Center @ Lake Merritt Station. Call the office at 510-464-7134. It also has a 24/7 voicemail.

The Transit Information Center's hours will remain the same: 8:00 AM- 6:00 PM, Monday - Friday