A BART train on the Pittsburg/Bay Point line arrives at Embarcadero station, San Francisco, May 14, 2026.

Tempers flared at Monday’s Clipper Executive Board meeting as a medley of issues connected to the next generation Clipper transition continue to plague Bay Area transit agencies.

“You have zero credibility,” said BART general manager Robert Powers during a heated rant directed at Cubic Transportation Systems, the contractor that operates the region’s Clipper system, including BART fare gates and ticket machines.

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For transit nerds, it was a strange feeling of deja vu.

Powers used the same words while lambasting the operator for the botched rollout — which was “around 700 days late” by his calculations — at a meeting last year. This time, it was a series of outages that took center stage, particularly the May 18 interruption that rendered all BART ticket machines practically useless for nearly 30 hours. 

Turns out the culprit behind this wasn’t a system........

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