BART shutdown caused by old control system that’s due to be modernized

This article was originally published on The Oaklandside.

The entire regional BART transit system came to a halt Friday morning due to a network connectivity issue, according to a new security report from the agency.  

The staffers managing the trains at the operations control center at the Lake Merritt station in Oakland could not see the track circuits placed on the system’s rails, forcing them to halt service because they could not know where the trains were. 

The network issue and shutdown at 4:24 a.m. forced thousands of people to seek alternative ways to move around the bay.

“The disruption’s root cause was related to intermittent connectivity network devices. Visibility of this system in the Operations Control Center is required to run service,” the agency said. 

BART said part of the network “was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it.” Service was resumed around 9:30 a.m. 

“We apologize for the disruptive morning and not having train service to get people where they need to go,” said BART General Manager Robert Powers. “Reliability is our brand, and we understand the impact when the system isn’t working.

Alicia Trost, a BART communications officer, told Richmondside that the network device issue is not part of the train control system, “but it did impact the train control system.”

The transit agency’s central train control system, relying on track circuits, is still the same one that has been used since BART’s inception in 1972. While the system has largely held up, it has led to similar shutdown incidents over the years. 

BART control system developed in 1960s by Westinghouse

Originally designed and developed in the 1960s by Westinghouse Electric with contracting elements from General Railway Signal, Garrett AiResearch, and IBM, the control system manages basic train functions. That includes its acceleration and braking system, and the placement of the train inside each “block” of rail. This type of system is called a “fixed block” system, in which rail sections are split into sections hundreds of feet long and only allow a few trains at a time. The old system picks up where each train is located through small circuits on the rails. 

Last year, former BART Director Rebecca Saltzman, now a city council member in El Cerrito, said the fixed block system needed to be updated to send more trains per hour. Friday morning, she said it has been ”remarkable just how reliable the old system still is,” considering how infrequent complete system shutdowns are.  

But a modernization still needs to happen, she said. 

“That critical replacement project is in progress,” Saltzman said, with recent reports and contract agreements suggesting that system control modernization could be completed in 2029 or 2030. 

Saltzman noted that many presentations to the BART board over the last 10 years have discussed the importance of train control, some of which focused on improving network reliability.

The system “can’t tell if the trains are at the beginning of the block, the middle of the block, or the end of the block,” she said. “So sometimes there is a whole block of space between trains, which is quite a long space. This means you can’t run them as close together and keep them safe with the train control system. The current system is very safe, but it’s not efficient.”

When it was built, BART’s microprocessor-based communications system, using IBM 1800 computers, was ahead of its time, allowing it to run automatic trains. But by the early 1970s, software and circuit logic errors became apparent, leading to problems, including an “overshooting” of the Fremont train terminal in 1972. This led to independent audits from the National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies. The result was adding more speed control circuits and human supervision to the system.

In recent years, BART has sought to update the control system through several regional, state, and federal grants. 

In 2021, the agency applied unsuccessfully for $25 million from the Biden administration’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity grant program, which was focused on funding major infrastructure projects. That money would’ve been used to update the southern East Bay part of the system. 

These grants sought to entirely switch the BART block system to a “communications-based train control,” known as CBTCs, where trains communicate directly to system computers instead of through circuits on the rails. The system can help monitor trains to a pinpoint location using real-time coordinates.

As part of this update, likely most pertinent to Friday’s shutdown, the system would also receive new network infrastructure, like new breakers at stations and power supply cabinets, and cars would be outfitted with new sensors. 

In that grant application, the agency said in 2017, “between 10 and 20 percent of all delayed trains were caused by problems with the existing train control system.”

The agency noted in its application that the control system was “nearing the end of its useful life and experiences frequent failures,” including in system resets.  

“These repeating failures have a detrimental impact on automatic train operation, resulting in immediate impacts to revenue service, system safety, and reliability. The current system is obsolete, with limited access to spare parts and requires extensive preventative maintenance to remain operable,” said the BART grant application.

The federal government declined the 2021 RAISE grant, but the agency’s submission to the state’s Solutions for Congested Corridors grant the following year netted $60 million. 

In an email, BART’s Trost told Richmondside that the continuing block system to CBTC project “had nothing to do with our problem today.”

In 2020, BART announced that the Japanese company Hitachi was awarded a contract worth $800 million to design, build, and install the new CBTC system.

The award was part of BART’s $3.5 billion Transbay Corridor Core Capacity project, including new modern train cars, the expansion of its main maintenance complex in Hayward, and five new power stations. BART received a Transit and Innercity Rail Capital Program grant worth more than $100 million for this program, but entered into a $1.17 billion Capital Investment Grant (CIG) agreement with the Federal Transit Administration to fund it fully. 

Pedestrian and bike advocates used the shutdown to press the case for improved transit connections along BART routes. 

Justin Hu-Nguyen, co-executive director of Bike East Bay, a bike nonprofit advocacy group, said that over the last few years, he’s seen outages of BART service at the West Oakland station, which often affect working-class people who are going into the city to work. He said that it’s an example of why the agency needs to speed up its control systems. It’s also a big reason the Bay Area needs more ways to travel to and from major locations, including a new eastern bike span of the Bay Bridge, where people could ride their bikes from the East Bay to San Francisco. 

“I’ve seen a lot more traffic on local roads today” because of the shutdown, Hu-Nguyen said. “In the bigger picture, we need resilience in the system. In New York, bikeshare exploded when the train system went down. People need more options besides BART outside of a single-person operating car.”