The public transit agency’s most trafficked stations were those in downtown San Francisco on Saturday during the NBA All-Stars Weekend and Chinese New Year Parade
Public transit across the country is under attack and underfunded. While we’ve (thankfully) not seen a Muni bus or cable car flip upside down, severe budgets have already affected service frequencies — and, if the funding continues to dry, the San Francisco Transit Agency (SFMTA) is facing an inevitable drought in operation. For a city that routinely sees north of 500,000 public transit riders each weekday, SFMTA falling off a fiscal cliff would be disastrous.
We had our highest Saturday ridership since the pandemic this past weekend!
Between the Chinese New Year Parade and NBA All-Star Weekend Saturday we had 139,475 exits across the system.
Highest ridership stations:
Powell: 20K exits
Montgomery: 14K
Embarcadero: 11K pic.twitter.com/bZ9IPQpQBJ— BART (@SFBART) February 18, 2025
Muni ridership (and, thus, tangible public support) remains strong, and the agency hopes to have budgetary wiggle room by enforcing newly adopted parking fees. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has increased ridership fares by 5.5% since January to help curtail a projected $380 billion deficit by 2026.
But after setting record ridership figures this past weekend, things are looking up for BART.
“We had our highest Saturday ridership since the pandemic this past weekend,” reads a post on X by the rapid transit agency. “Between the Chinese New Year Parade and NBA All-Star Weekend Saturday we had 139,475 exits across the system.”
BART later shared that this past Saturday’s 139,475 exits were “45,855 more than the previous Saturday” and almost 16,00 more than the previous post-pandemic Saturday record, which was the Chinese New Year parade 2024 and Oakland FansFest.
WFH and hybridized work models were widely embraced in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic as a means to safeguard the public against the unnecessary risk of infection; the result led to an overly inflated exodus of major coastal cities and less reliance on public transit infrastructures. Nearly five years later, public transit agencies are still slowly recovering from ridership loss, though widespread adoption of car-free corridors and car congestion tolling have proven beneficial in speeding up those recovery efforts.
Regardless of the state of public transit, it remains statistically cheaper and safer to ride a bus, subway, or, even in our case, a cable car than it is to drive within city limits.
