FILE: Riders walk from a Muni bus near the 24th Street Mission BART station in San Francisco.
Jeff Chiu/APBART is tweaking its schedule starting Monday, the agency announced.
Changing commute patterns among Bay Area riders has led BART to revamp its train schedule, starting with the elimination of 30-minute wait times and a 50% increase in evening service, according to a recent press release. Wait times for the Yellow Line between Antioch and SFO will also be decreased to 10 minutes, the agency said.
Along with making changes to its schedule, BART will also be removing its legacy trains and only running service on “fleet of the future” trains. The new trains are shorter in length, the agency said, to aid with cleanliness and safety concerns.
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The new schedule is a way for the agency to contend with commute patterns that have changed immensely since the pandemic, BART’s manager of scheduling and planning John FitzGibbon said in a recent podcast.
“The post-pandemic ridership reality is that there just isn’t the level of peak that there has been over the course of most of BART’s life. So, the schedule is much flatter and less reliant because of all the things that are happening socially. Building a schedule that is looking at the places where there’s room for growth in the evenings and on the weekends was a way forward,” FitzGibbon said.
BART will now run nine trains per hour to and from SFO until 9 p.m., up from eight, and three trains per hour until midnight rather than two. Riders living in the areas of Pittsburg, Concord, Walnut Creek and Lafayette will now experience wait times of only 10 minutes for trains into San Francisco, Berkeley and Richmond, and those near Milpitas, Fremont and Union City will also wait only 10 minutes between trains to the city, until 9 p.m., BART said. Both the Richmond and Berryessa lines are scheduled to run trains to San Francisco every 10 minutes until 9 p.m. on weekends.
“The board over the years has asked for more service in the evenings, more service on the weekends and by taking a balance of some service during the weekdays and applying that to nights and weekends, we were able to create a more balanced solution that is roughly neutral in cost,” FitzGibbon said in the podcast.
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Transferring lines will be more efficient with the new system, FitzGibbon added.
“So that was one of the major focus was to ensure that no matter which line you’re on, the line to Berryessa, the line to Antioch, or the line to Richmond, that all those lines would be a 10-minute service into the City and we pretty much achieved that,” FitzGibbon said.