Two big Bay Area events helped push BART to its new post-pandemic Saturday record for ridership over this past weekend.
During the dark and isolating days of the COVID-19 pandemic, ridership among mass transit declined across the country… for obvious reasons. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) saw ridership plummet some 70% — a drop that’s taken years to pull back out of it. And the agency still isn’t quite there; now-permanent WFH or hybrid in-office day models and overhyped local exoduses have played a major part in that hard climb back up.
Saturday was a post-pandemic record breaking day for Saturday ridership.
Ridership was 123,636 trips.
That is 54k more trips than last Saturday. The previous post pandemic Saturday record was 116k in October 2023.SF’s Chinese New Year Parade and Oakland FansFest helped! pic.twitter.com/CGRtGXPRos
— BART (@SFBART) February 26, 2024
Nevertheless, Saturday, February 24th, saw a glimpse into a future where BART is thriving. Two large regional events, San Francisco’s Chinese New Year Parade (which remains the largest of its kind outside Asia) and Oakland’s Fans’ Fest festival, helped the rapid transit agency record its largest single-day ridership since March of 2020.
“Saturday was a post-pandemic [record-breaking] day for Saturday ridership,” writes the agency on X. “Ridership was 123,636 trips.”
The aforenoted figure bested the previous Saturday recorded on October 7th of last year during Fleet Week — “[BART] served 116,181 trips,” exclaimed the transit agency at the time, adding that the figure was about 72% of its average Saturday ridership before the pandemic.
Saturday’s record-breaking ridership figure exists within an optimistic mortar for BART; it’s seen ridership, both weekday and weekend calculations, slowly inch upward since 2022.
In November of last year, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTA) — the overseeing transportation planning, financing, and coordinating agency for all nine counties in the SF Bay Area — announced it would allocate $5B in State funding to help fiscally support the region’s transit agencies that continue to struggle, albeit less than they did in 202. As a result, those funds will safeguard those Bay Area agencies from needing to make service cuts through June 2026, helping ensure ridership figures have opportunities to continue climbing across the board.
Doom loop narratives? In 2024? We don’t know her {insert applicable Mariah Carey GIF}.
