New report reveals what's led to myriad of BART disruptions across Bay Area

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- After 15,000 hours of research, a new report was presented to the BART Board of Directors Thursday, pinpointing what went wrong in nearly a dozen different service disruptions since summer of 2025.

Aug. 29 was a chaotic evening on BART with smoke filling a train inside the Transbay Tube. BART says there was a brake problem but no fire.

Now, a new "root cause" report published by BART looks at that August incident and eight others on a core route from West Oakland through the Transbay Tube and into downtown San Francisco.

"The report covers three main areas -- traction power which powers the system and allows the vehicles to move. The second is the vehicles themselves. third is the trackway," said Lauren Tolkoff, Transportation Policy Director of SPUR- a nonprofit public policy organization tackling issues like public transit and housing.

"What I take from this- BART is taking very seriously the number of disruptions that have happened over the last few months," said Tolkoff.

The report does not include the major meltdown in September that shut down service for nine hours.

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"I was on that train that day. I think we have to remember that BART is one of the most reliable systems in the country. We do need it to be reliable. So, addressing these rates are absolutely critical," said Tolkoff.

Tolkoff believes it's important to focus on incidents on the Transbay Tube first.

"Every single train goes through the Transbay Tunnel. Problems there will cascade through the entirety of the system so it's really the most important place to start and start making repairs," said Tolkoff.

Representatives from the company hired to do the report believe there is no single issue that caused all the disruptions.

"It's several contributing factors that have led to an environment where there's power fluctuations or power trips or something that can interrupt the flow of current," said BART spokesperson, Alicia Trost.

The repeated service outages have contributed to some people's perceptions that BART is in a continuous cycle of problems.

MORE: BART has 5th major disruption of 2025 with Transbay Tube track issue causing delays

It also comes at a time where the agency is hoping voters will approve a new sales tax measure to help it close its massive budget deficit.

Former BART Director, Debora Allen says Thursday's meeting left her with some concerns.

"This meeting was billed as a root cause analysis, looking at a root cause analysis for their many problems or service delays over the last year. And I didn't really see any root causes put forth other than things that the BART board should have already known were problems," she said.

BART says they have already fixed or are currently addressing some of the issues the report has highlighted.

And they say a final analysis will also come soon.

"Moving forward they're going to do some modeling, which is very exciting for us. They can actually recreate incidents or run simulations to see what could potentially happen," said Trost.