Some lucky commuters got to ride BART for free Monday morning after a Clipper glitch put ticket vending machines out of service and made it difficult to add fare.
It was the second outage in three weeks for the Bay Area’s fare payment system, which has suffered a flurry of setbacks since officials rolled out “Clipper 2.0” last December. In May, transit fare machines went dark for 27 hours due to an alarming unforced error: Vendor Cubic Corp. forgot to pay a bill on one of its accounts with AT&T.
Monday’s incident prevented people from paying for parking or adding fare to their Clipper cards, prompting an agent at BART’s San Bruno Station to let riders through the gates for free. At Powell Station some machines bore a red “Out of Service” message while others appeared to be working. Train services proceeded without interruption, and riders were still able to tap in with bank or credit cards or phones with Apple and Google Pay…