Transit troubles don’t dampen Warriors celebration

BART bent but did not break Monday, as tens of thousands of fans rode trains from across the Bay Area for the Warriors’ championship parade.

The crush of fans clad in blue and gold tested the logistical fortitude of not just BART, but the Clipper electronic ticketing system and even the San Francisco Police Department, which for a time struggled to hold back a raucous crowd that surrounded the buses just feet away from players and their families.

Well before the parade started, highway traffic into San Francisco from the south and east began to snarl highways despite people being encouraged to take public transit.

Then BART said a trackside power issue had downed its direct service to San Francisco on its Richmond line, after an issue on Friday had temporarily put that line, the red line, out of service.

Trains began running again from Richmond in time for the 9 a.m. hour, which the agency said would be its busiest, before the problem with the mobile Clipper ticketing app arose.

“The Clipper mobile app and virtual card systems experienced unprecedented demand due to the Warriors parade this morning,” John Goodwin, public information officer for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Bay Area Toll Authority, said in an email Monday afternoon.

Goodwin said people had to try a few times until it worked, adding, “It was kind of a ‘third time’s the charm’ situation.”

He said despite the ballooned ridership, “Clipper was properly performing purchases ... though not at the speeds either customers or we at MTC would expect.”

In an earlier tweet, Clipper officials said the app was having problems with payment and purchasing. They urged people to load their cards before getting to stations or find better cell service earlier in the day, but to keep trying because orders were still going through.

Some Twitter users said they were having problems with the app despite being far away from the packed stations, however. Clipper said a team was investigating the issues, which also affected Clipper in Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Cell phone service was also spotty on the parade route on Market Street, packed with tens of thousands of revelers.

BART posted a picture its Dublin station shortly before 9:30 a.m. showing long lines stretching out to buy Clipper cards, although it said that had cleared up a few hours later.

The SFPD could not be reached to provide crowd estimates. Mayor London Breed’s office could not immediately provide a count.

BART said that as of 4 p.m., it had served 134,000 riders, 88% up from last Monday at the same time. But that’s an undercount, spokesperson Alicia Trost said, because the Clipper system went down for part of the day at some stations, and BART also let people through the gates when lines got too long.

Toward the end of the parade route shortly before 2 p.m., police attempted to move people away from the buses charioting the players down Market Street. But fans pushed aside barriers and followed the buses mere feet away, only a ring of police separating them from the champions.

At the end of the parade at Eighth and Market streets, police cut off access to a gated area where players and officials were entering, hollering at fans to move out of the parade route and to get off barricades.

“They’ve got to get all these people out of there,” said a woman standing behind one of the barriers. “This is terrible.”