The Road to Recovery: Bay Area Rapid Transit

In September, BART celebrated its 50-year anniversary since its opening on Sept. 11, 1972. The rapid transit system spans 131 miles of tracks, covering five counties with its 50 stations. From industrial areas in West Oakland to bustling San Francisco International Airport, BART takes riders across the Bay Area to their destinations.

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, BART offered a 50% fare discount through September. This is the second time that BART has reduced the price for rides for an entire month, with the last one in September 2021.

The price reduction is more of an appreciation for riders than an incentive to boost ridership, BART spokesperson Chris Filippi told KQED.

Ridership data proved him right. From August to November 2022, while the average weekday ridership shows an increase from last year, the average number of riders didn’t increase much in September.

Office workers who used to fill the streets of San Francisco during lunch hours haven’t come back to the office. The city’s office-vacancy rate reached 25.5% at the end of September, according to real estate brokerage CBRE Group Inc. As other aspects of life return to normal, workers are still not fully back to work in person, and they might never will.

In the past, a large number of BART ridership has been from commuting workers during peak hours between San Francisco and east bay cities. With most downtown offices still closed and remote work as an option for workers, BART ridership hasn’t recovered to its pre-pandemic level.

BART ridership averaged around 400,000 trips on weekdays in 2019. According to a 2019 report from Bay Area Rapid Transit, nearly 25,600 people ride through the Transbay Tube into downtown San Francisco during peak commute hours.

In the first two months of 2020, the BART weekday trips are still at the same level as that of 2019, but the number dropped greatly starting March 2020. Two years later, around 100,000 trips were made every weekday on BART, but it’s still far from recovery.

The decline in BART ridership didn’t only start when the pandemic hits. From the ridership data from 1998 to 2022, it’s clear that BART's average weekday ridership seems to have peaked in February 2016 — over 446,000 trips a day — and has been on the decline since then.

In the years when more than 400,000 trips were made each weekday across the Bay Area, data showed where people are traveling from and where they are heading to. By looking at the entry and exit stations of each trip, we were able to find the top 20 journeys made across the transit system.

On an average weekday in March 2019, for example, the entry stations for the top 20 journeys were pretty evenly distributed with stations like Balboa Park, 24th Mission, Dublin/Pleasanton and West Oakland. The destinations? Nearly half of the exit stations are in downtown San Francisco, such as Montgomery Street and Embarcadero.

On the weekends, people’s travel patterns become slightly different. On a Saturday in the same month, the stations in the financial district such as Embarcadero and Montgomery Street where office workers went to work, were no longer among the most popular entry stations. But people were still traveling from outside the city to downtown area, most getting off at Powell Street.

Data for this project can be accessed here.