Bay Area commuters get free rides Tuesday morning due to Clipper card outage
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The Clipper card, used for travel on all forms of public transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area, was down on Tuesday morning.
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financial news
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July 1, 2025
04:31 PM
CNBC
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The Clipper card, used for travel on all forms of public transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area, was down on Tuesday morning
According to a post on X from the Bay Area Clipper account, "The clipper system is experiencing an outage on all operators. "Clipper is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which manages transportation for the nine-county Bay Area
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) passengers walk off a train at the Richmond station on March 15, 2023 in Richmond, California
Justin Sullivan | Getty ImagesCommuters in and around San Francisco rode into work for free on Tuesday morning due to an outage in the Clipper card system, which is used to handle payments for train, bus and ferry rides. "ATTENTION: The Clipper system is experiencing an outage on all operators this morning," the Bay Area Clipper account wrote in a post on X. "Please be prepared to pay your fare with another form of payment if required by your transit agency. "Many buses were waving commuters on without asking for payment, and at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train stations, the faregates were open, allowing travelers to walk through for free
Clipper is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which manages transportation for the nine-county Bay Area
The service is used by hundreds of thousands of workers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley
The MTC website said there were 1. 35 million unique Clipper cards — physical and digital — used in May, the highest monthly toll for the year and the most since December 2019, before the pandemic
A fact sheet from the MTC says Clipper is used by 800,000 transit riders a day across the region
BART fare gates open on July 1, 2025, due to Clipper outageKif LeswingBART, in particular, has undergone dramatic changes in recent years, most notably installing fare gates starting in late 2023, with full deployment expected to be by the end of this year
In the first five months of the year, average BART station exits totaled between 170,000 and 182,000 a month, according to its website
Those numbers are way down from the pre-pandemic days of 2019, when averages were generally above 400,000 a month
The MTC has plans to roll out an d system called Clipper 2. 0, which it says will be a "customer-focused, cost-effective fare collection system" with a "flexible platform for future fare structures. " Features include use across the various mobile operating systems, d communication and "expanded retail, online and mobile sales. "The, however, has been routinely delayed, leading to tense confrontations at recent Clipper executive board meetings
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