Clipper Outage Fixed After Forcing Bay Area Transit Agencies to Go Fare-Free for Hours

Updated 1:32 p.m. Tuesday

The Clipper system that allows hundreds of thousands of Bay Area commuters to pay transit fares suffered a total network failure on Tuesday morning, forcing bus, train and ferry agencies across the region to suspend fare collections for several hours.

Just before 5 a.m., BART alerted station agents across its 50-station network that the Clipper system was down. The agency opened all fare gates, a move followed by Muni and other agencies to allow commuters to make their trips.

Metropolitan Transportation Commission spokesperson John Goodwin said the cause of the outage wasn’t immediately known. Although it came on the same day that fare increases took effect for agencies including Muni, AC Transit, Caltrain and San Francisco Bay Ferry, Goodwin said the outage was unrelated.

Cubic Transportation Systems, the contractor that runs Clipper, told the MTC at 10 a.m. that it was rolling out a fix to the system’s software, a painstaking, operator-by-operator process it completed by noon.

The MTC will make an effort to compensate transit operators for fares they’re missing during the outage, Goodwin said. The exact mechanism for doing that is unknown at this point.

The Clipper payment system, initially called TransLink, was launched in 2006. The system has been criticized over the years for being slow to incorporate features like phone and smartwatch payments.

The MTC has been preparing for a next-generation system, dubbed Clipper 2.0, since 2013. In 2018, the commission awarded a $461 million contract to Cubic to develop and operate the new system

By 2020, MTC and Cubic were promising a full transition to Clipper 2.0 by the end of 2023. The date was moved back to the spring of 2024, then the spring of 2025.

The MTC and operators have promised that the new system will make it possible to offer a wide range of fare programs designed to make transit more attractive: credit and debit card payments; free transfers between bus and rail agencies; and “fare-capping,” a system that sets a maximum daily or weekly cost for users regardless of how many times they ride.

The repeated delays in introducing the new card have prompted sharp criticism from a committee of transit executives appointed to monitor the work.

“We get close to the milestone, we get close to the goalpost, the goalpost moves to the right,” BART General Manager Robert Powers complained to project managers in January. “Then we get closer, closer, closer — the goalposts moved again.”

At the committee’s meeting last month, Powers blasted Cubic for failing to meet the latest delivery date.

“You have zero credibility,” Powers said. “I mean, you’re talking about building confidence. You’ve got zero, you, meaning Cubic.”