By Ricardo Cano
BART will change schedules in September and run trains every 20 minutes across all five lines at all hours on weekdays and weekends.
Agency officials said the changes, announced Thursday, attempt to adapt the regional rail system to compete against the Bay Area’s disrupted travel patterns. To date, BART scheduling has mostly resembled 2019 service, with trains running every 15 minutes on all five lines during weekdays and less frequently during evenings and weekends.
Starting Sept. 11, weekday and weekend schedules will closely resemble one another. Trains will run at least every 20 minutes on each line from open to close, benefiting night and weekend riders who now wait 30 minutes or longer on some trips.
BART will also run more trains to San Francisco and Oakland international airports on weekdays.
No other route will benefit more from the new changes than BART’s Yellow Line to Antioch.
The Antioch line is the system’s workhorse line, and its trains are closest to resembling the packed weekday crowds before the pandemic.
The Yellow Line averages 99 passengers per train car during peak travel times, about twice the amount of any other BART line. BART will run six trains per hour, or every 10 minutes, on the Yellow Line on weekdays until 9 p.m.
There are some tradeoffs to the schedule changes, which will not raise operating costs for the fare-dependent agency.
Added frequencies on evenings and weekends come at the expense of adding five minutes to wait times on weekdays, particularly on the Blue Line to Dublin/Pleasanton.
BART ridership has stagnated since last fall, with weekday ridership about 40% of pre-pandemic levels. Downtown office workers accounted for a significant share of BART’s ridership in 2019, but many of them now only commute to work two or three times a week, if at all. Most Bay Area employers have already made long-term decisions on return-to-office requirements.
Agency officials said they will track ridership data to determine whether the changes succeeded in growing BART’s customer base. They acknowledged that success depends on improving BART’s reliability, which has seen a decline since last year.
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