Commuters 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 tech 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, in particular, has undergone dramatic changes in recent years, most notably installing fare gates starting in late 2023, with full deployment expected to be completed 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 updated 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, updated communication and “expanded retail, online and mobile sales.”

The update, however, has been routinely delayed, leading to tense confrontations at recent Clipper executive board meetings.

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