Bay Area Rapid Transit
Bay Area Rapid Transit is a rapid transit system serving the San Francisco Bay Area in California. BART serves 50 stations along six routes and of track, including eBART, a spur line running to Antioch, and Oakland Airport Connector, a automated guideway transit line serving Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport. With an average of weekday passenger trips as of and annual passenger trips in, BART is the seventh-busiest rapid transit system in the United States.
BART is operated by the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District which formed in 1957. The initial system opened in stages from 1972 to 1974. The system has been extended several times, most recently in 2020, when Milpitas and Berryessa/North San José stations opened as part of the under construction Silicon Valley BART extension in partnership with the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.
Services
BART serves large portions of its three member counties – San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa – as well as smaller portions of San Mateo County and Santa Clara counties. The system has 50 stations: 22 in Alameda County, 12 in Contra Costa County, 8 in San Francisco, 6 in San Mateo County, and 2 in Santa Clara County. BART operates five named heavy rail services plus one separate automated guideway line. All of the heavy rail services run through Oakland, and all but the Orange Line cross the bay through the Transbay Tube to San Francisco. All five services run every day until 9 pm; only three services operate evenings after 9 pm. All stations are served during all service hours. The eastern segment of the uses different rolling stock and is separated from the rest of the line.Hours and frequencies
BART's network topology, which mixes densely-packed urban stations served at high frequencies by multiple interlined services along a central trunk with branching suburban lines with widely-spaced stations and lower frequencies, is similar to European S-Bahn systems. Trains on each primary service run every 20 minutes, except the busy Yellow Line, which operates every 10 minutes on weekdays. However, many stations are served by multiple lines; the trunk between West Oakland and Daly City receives 15 trains per hour in peak hours. The Oakland Airport Connector runs "on demand", typically on headways of 10 minutes or less.Timed cross-platform transfers are available between the Orange Line, which runs north-south through the East Bay, and the Yellow Line, which operates through the Transbay Tube to serve the San Francisco Peninsula. This service complements the Red Line during daytime hours and replaces that line when it stops operating after 9:00 p.m.
The first inbound trains leave outer terminals around 5:00 am on weekdays, 6:00 am on Saturdays, and 8:00 am on Sundays and most holidays. The last trains of the service day leave their terminals around midnight; the final Yellow and Orange Line trains in both directions meet at MacArthur station, and the final Orange and Blue Line trains in the southbound direction meet at Bay Fair station, for guaranteed transfers.
Bus services
Two different bus networks are operated by regional transit agencies as a rail replacement bus service when BART is not operating due to regularly scheduled maintenance during the overnight hours.The All Nighter network provides basic bus service to San Francisco, the East Bay, and Peninsula, replicating rail transit services in those regions, including BART, Caltrain, and Muni Metro. All Nighter buses serve most BART stations, replicating 3-Line late night BART service with abbreviated routes:
- Buses replicating Yellow Line service terminate at Rockridge
- Buses replicating Blue Line service terminate at Bay Fair
- Buses replicating Orange Line service terminate at Fremont
The network is another bus alternative which provides service to major BART stations in the early morning between 3:50 am and 5:30 am. Early Bird Express buses are operated by local transit agencies, including AC Transit, Golden Gate Transit, Muni, and SamTrans, running between a limited number of major BART stations on San Francisco/Peninsula and Transbay routes which all meet at the Salesforce Transit Center. Early Bird Express routes are identified by three-digit route numbers starting with 7xx., there are six Early Bird Express routes, replicating 3-Line service:
- Yellow Line bus substitute operating to and from Millbrae
- Blue Line bus operating to and from Daly City
- Yellow Line buses operating from Pittsburg/Bay Point and Pleasant Hill
- Blue Line bus operating from Dublin/Pleasanton
- Orange Line bus operating from El Cerrito del Norte
Historically, BART operated bus service between 1974 and 1997, extending transit coverage to central and eastern Alameda and Contra Costa counties; these routes were discontinued following the completion of rail line extensions starting in the late 1990s. BART Express was operated for BART under contracts to AC Transit and Laidlaw. Since then, some services similar to the legacy BART Express routes which were not replaced by rail service have been taken over by local bus operators, including WestCAT and Tri Delta Transit.
To accommodate those with conditions and disabilities that prevent from boarding a train, BART has entered a joint venture with AC Transit to establish East Bay Paratransit to provide paratransit bus services.
Connecting services
Intermodal connections to local, regional, and intercity transit – including bus, light rail, commuter rail, and intercity rail – are available across the BART system. Three Amtrak intercity rail services – the California Zephyr, Capitol Corridor, and Gold Runner – stop at Richmond station; the Capitol Corridor also stops at Oakland Coliseum station. Transfer between BART and the Caltrain commuter rail service is available at Millbrae station.BART and most lines of San Francisco's Muni Metro light rail system share four stations in the Market Street subway; connections are also available to three lines at Balboa Park station and one line at Glen Park station. A tunnel at the Powell Street station connects to the Union Square/Market Street station on the Muni Metro T Third Street line. In the South Bay, Milpitas station provides a connection to the Orange Line of VTA light rail.
BART is served by bus connections from regional and local transit agencies at all stations, most of which have dedicated off-street bus transfer areas. Many connecting routes serve primarily as feeder routes to BART. Larger bus systems connecting to BART include Muni in San Francisco, AC Transit in the East Bay, SamTrans in San Mateo County, County Connection and Tri Delta Transit in eastern Contra Costa County, WestCAT in western Contra Costa County, WHEELS in the Tri-Valley, VTA in the Santa Clara Valley, and Golden Gate Transit. Smaller systems include Emery Go-Round in Emeryville, Commute.org on the Peninsula, San Leandro LINKS, Dumbarton Express, and Union City Transit. The Salesforce Transit Center regional bus hub is located one block from Embarcadero and Montgomery stations.
Several transit agencies offer limited commuter-oriented bus service from more distant cities to outlying BART stations; these include VINE from Napa County, Solano Express from Solano County, Rio Vista Delta Breeze, Stanislaus Regional Transit Authority from Stanislaus County, and San Joaquin RTD from Stockton. Many BART stations are also served by privately run employer and hospital shuttles, and privately run intercity buses stop at several stations.
Airport connections
BART also runs directly to two of the three major Bay Area airports with service to San Jose International Airport provided by a VTA bus route available at Milpitas station.History
Origins, planning, and geographical coverage
Some of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system's current coverage area was once served by an electrified streetcar and suburban train system called the Key System. This early 20th-century system once had regular transbay traffic across the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, but the system was dismantled in the 1950s, with its last transbay crossing in 1958, and was superseded by highway travel. A 1950s study of traffic problems in the Bay Area concluded the most cost-effective solution for the Bay Area's traffic woes would be to form a transit district charged with the construction and operation of a new, high-speed rapid transit system linking the cities and suburbs. Marvin E. Lewis, a San Francisco trial attorney and member of the city's board of supervisors, spearheaded a grassroots movement to advance the idea of an alternative bay crossing and the possibility of regional transit network.Formal planning for BART began with the setting up in 1957 of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, a county-based special-purpose district body that governs the BART system. The district initially began with five members, all of which were projected to receive BART lines: Alameda County, Contra Costa County, the City and County of San Francisco, San Mateo County, and Marin County. Although invited to participate, Santa Clara County supervisors elected not to join BART due to their dissatisfaction that the peninsula line only stopped at Palo Alto initially, and that it interfered with suburban development in San Jose, preferring instead to concentrate on constructing freeways and expressways. Though the system expanded into Santa Clara County in 2020, as of June 2024 it is still not a district member.
In 1962, San Mateo County supervisors voted to leave BART, saying their voters would be paying taxes to carry mainly Santa Clara County residents. The district-wide tax base was weakened by San Mateo's departure, forcing Marin County to withdraw a month later. Despite the fact that Marin had originally voted in favor of BART participation at the 88% level, its marginal tax base could not adequately absorb its share of BART's projected cost. Another important factor in Marin's withdrawal was an engineering controversy over the feasibility of running trains on the lower deck of the Golden Gate Bridge, an extension forecast as late as three decades after the rest of the BART system. The withdrawals of Marin and San Mateo resulted in a downsizing of the original system plans, which would have had lines as far south as Palo Alto and northward past San Rafael. Voters in the three remaining participating counties approved the truncated system, with termini in Fremont, Richmond, Concord, and Daly City, in 1962.
Construction of the system began in 1964, and included a number of major engineering challenges, including excavating subway tunnels in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley; constructing aerial structures throughout the Bay Area, particularly in Alameda and Contra Costa counties; tunneling through the Berkeley Hills on the Concord line; and lowering the system's centerpiece, the Transbay Tube connecting Oakland and San Francisco, into a trench dredged onto the floor of San Francisco Bay. Like other transit systems of the same era, BART endeavored to connect outlying suburbs with job centers in Oakland and San Francisco by building lines that paralleled established commuting routes of the region's freeway system. BART envisioned frequent local service, with headways as short as two minutes between trains through the Transbay Tube and six minutes on each individual line.