BART Commuters Sidelined by Clipper Tech Outage

(TNS) — A Clipper glitch made it difficult for BART riders to add money to their fare cards at station ticket machines Monday morning, forcing some riders to look for other ways to pay or get through the gates.

Bay Area Clipper said customers were experiencing problems adding value to Clipper cards at BART ticket machines and directed riders to use the Clipper app, online accounts, Apple or Google wallets, retailers or contactless bank cards while the issue was being fixed.

At the Montgomery Street Station in downtown San Francisco, a BART station agent was letting riders through an emergency gate Monday morning. The agent described the problem as a systemwide outage.

John Goodwin, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said he noticed out-of-order signs on ticket machines when he arrived at Embarcadero Station shortly after 8 a.m. He said he had not yet received an explanation from Clipper and referred riders to Clipper’s website for the latest information.

BART’s own alerts page carried a related Monday morning notice saying riders adding funds at vending machines must hold their Clipper cards at the reader — rather than tap them — while completing the transaction.

BART attributed that step to ongoing Clipper upgrades.

The problem lands during a bumpy rollout for the Bay Area’s next-generation Clipper system, a major upgrade intended to make fare payment faster and more flexible.

In a recent MTC update, staff said ticket vending machines remained “unreliable or slow,” limiting customers’ ability to obtain or load value, with fixes still underway.

The same report said BART updates were planned to improve transaction speed, though the timeline was still pending.

It was not immediately clear Monday how many stations or riders were affected, when the problem began or when ticket machine service would return to normal.

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