FILE: Riders exit a Muni bus near the 24th Street Mission BART station in San Francisco.
Jeff Chiu/AP
BART is adjusting its schedule starting Monday, the agency announced.
Changing commuting habits among Bay Area riders have prompted BART to overhaul its train schedule, starting with eliminating 30-minute wait times and a 50 percent increase in evening service, according to a recent news release. Wait times for the Yellow Line between Antioch and SFO will also be reduced to 10 minutes, the agency said.
In addition to changes to the schedule, BART will also eliminate its old trains and only use trains from the “Fleet of the Future.” The new trains will be shorter, the agency said, to address cleanliness and safety concerns.
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The new schedule is a way for the agency to deal with commuting patterns that have changed immensely since the pandemic, John FitzGibbon, manager of planning and planning for BART, said in a recent podcast.
“The post-pandemic reality is that ridership simply has not reached the peak it has reached over most of BART’s lifespan. So the schedule is much flatter and less dependent because of all the social events. “Creating a schedule that takes into account the locations where there is room for growth in the evenings and 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 instead of two until midnight. Riders living in the Pittsburg, Concord, Walnut Creek and Lafayette areas will now only have to wait 10 minutes for trains to San Francisco, Berkeley and Richmond, and those near Milpitas, Fremont and Union City will also have to wait between trains only a 10-minute wait into town until 9 p.m., BART said. Both the Richmond and Berryessa lines are scheduled to have trains to San Francisco every 10 minutes until 9 p.m. on weekends.
“The board has, over the years, requested more service in the evenings and more service on the weekends, and by offsetting some of the weekday service and applying it to the nights and weekends, we were able to create a more balanced solution that was approximately cost-neutral.” said FitzGibbon on the podcast.
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The transmission of lines will be more efficient with the new system, FitzGibbon added.
“One of our main focuses was to make sure that all of these lines, no matter what line you’re on, the line to Berryessa, the line to Antioch or the line to Richmond, are within 10 minutes of the city and have that we have largely achieved,” said FitzGibbon.