A wet weather-related brake failure on BART’s new “Fleet of the Future” explains many of the delays plaguing the system this rainy winter, NBC’s Bay Area Investigative Unit has learned.
On a dreary day earlier this month, rain-soaked riders at BART’s Walnut Creek Station were quick to complain about having to wait 10 to 20, even 40 minutes during this unusually rainy season.
“The delays have been extremely bad, really bad, especially with all the rain and the weather,” said one runner, Rachel Boyett.
“So I’ll generally miss my first train, but I’ll plan and catch the second one,” said another, Arjun Madra.
“It’s a big deal,” added veteran Blake Peterson.
In fact, newly released BART data covering just the last three months of 2022 shows that rain accounted for nine of BART’s ten worst hits to delayed trains.
The delays have come as BART is rolling out more of its new “Fleet of the Future” train cars, which it has long considered far superior to its “legacy” fleet.
“The new train cars are now more reliable than the old ones,” BART spokesman Jim Allison said in an interview this week.
While that may be true in general, Allison recently acknowledged that BART has been facing a challenge with the new fleet: how the new cars brake in response to wet conditions.
Allison says the new cars are equipped with sensors that detect when the train’s wheels are slipping or turning too fast on rain-slicked rails. The idea is to make sure the train can stop safely at the next station. When the sensors turn on, the train’s emergency brakes are activated to ensure safety. This solves the security problem, he says, but creates a reliability problem.
“We’re having problems with the new trains where the whole train will have flat wheels and we have to take the whole train out of service,” Allison said.
He acknowledged that most wheels don’t go flat when old trains feel water on the track. But the fleets new braking system automatically applies to all wheels at once, making them go “flat” simultaneously.
The uneven wear on the wheels caused by this braking forces entire trains into the shop, like BART’s maintenance yard in Hayward. BART officials say it can take up to three shifts of work to resurface the wheels of one car, much longer than an entire train of eight to 10 cars.
Allison says BART hopes a more advanced train control system will fix the problem, but that could take a decade to come online. Meanwhile, BART has been reducing speeds on the above-ground portions of its system on rainy days. This has been causing delays and has not completely removed the problem from the plans. “It’s not an ideal situation, we wouldn’t consider it unless we had to,” Allison said.
But the problem is not new. In January 2021, BART halted shipments of more of its new fleet cars, to address “reliability underperformance” issues and rain-related braking plans.
But in February 2022, BART began accepting new train cars despite the continued braking problem. BART’s Allison says that was because the transit agency still believed the new cars were superior to its legacy fleet.
“We were confident that by the time we resumed acceptance of the cars, the reliability issues had been addressed to the point where we felt we were good going forward,” Allison said. Today, new cars make up about half of BART’s fleet, but the system is still falling short of its goals for available cars.
BART board member Debora Allen says routine rain delays are just one more factor in BART’s inability to get riders back in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. “Delays are really unacceptable,” Allen said. “We can’t move forward for the rest of the time with the trains being delayed every time… it’s wet.”
“Clearly, they need to fix it,” said passenger Blake Peterson, who has been loyal to BART for two decades. But all the recent issues with safety and train delays, he says, “make me want to get in my car and drive over the Bay Bridge every day.”
