CA: BART traffic remains in a hole. But it's worse at these stations

On a recent Friday morning at the North Concord BART station, people exiting trains onto the platform were few and far between. Cows grazing placidly on the nearby hillsides seemed more plentiful.

It's no surprise: Ridership at the station was down more than 66% in 2024 compared with 2019. And trips to and from downtown San Francisco from the East Bay station were down even more, with 75% fewer trips in 2024 than before the pandemic.

After the pandemic shattered the Bay Area's commuting patterns, yearly BART ridership has continued to struggle to rise to anywhere near 2019 levels. While San Francisco's downtown stations have suffered enormous losses in passenger traffic, BART's most far-flung stations have also seen a disproportionate decline, a Chronicle analysis found.

Along with North Concord, the Warm Springs/South Fremont and Millbrae stations suffered some of the largest overall ridership losses last year. Warm Springs saw 72% less ridership in 2024 compared with 2019, and Millbrae saw 67% less.

Some of these declines are more easily explained than others. As BART spokesperson Alicia Trost pointed out, Warm Springs was the southernmost BART stop in 2019, but in 2020 the Milpitas and Berryessa stations opened, shifting some ridership there. And Millbrae, a transfer point for similarly struggling Caltrain service from the Peninsula, has seen service reduced from every 15 to every 20 minutes on weekdays.

But declines to other stations on the outskirts — such as North Concord, Pleasant Hill, Dublin and West Dublin — were nearly as big, and seemingly more organic, reflecting behavior changes as people no longer have to strategize about which stations will have parking or where trains will fill up.

Commuters from Walnut Creek, for instance, might have opted to go to Pleasant Hill Station because it has a larger parking lot that didn't fill up as quickly, Trost noted. Before the pandemic, there was also a morning rush hour train that began at Pleasant Hill Station, which meant riders who got on there were guaranteed a seat. Now, the days when parking and seats on BART were scarce seem like a distant memory.

North Concord, like the system as a whole, has seen its greatest ridership losses during commuting hours, particularly on Monday and Friday.

BART stations that have recovered better, on the other hand, tend to serve lower-income communities and those with less access to vehicles, BART officials noted in a report in June. Meanwhile, workers in better-off communities at the periphery could have shifted more of their trips to cars or continued to work remotely.

The numbers are even more stark at each of these stations when looking specifically at rides ending at one of the four downtown San Francisco stations: Civic Center, Powell, Montgomery and Embarcadero. Each of the aforementioned stations saw trips to these stations decline by around 70% or more.

Nearly all of the changes impacting ridership at different stations have one thing in common: the dramatic change in commutes brought on by the pandemic.

"Remote work trends have had a huge impact on BART ridership," Trost said.

That shift has left the transit agency, which is more dependent on fare revenue than other transportation agencies around the country, facing a fiscal cliff that threatens to decimate the system by forcing longer wait times between trains, station and line closures and restricted service hours, the agency has said. That in turn could mean fewer people riding on transit, which means even more cars on the road, more traffic and less parking, officials have noted.

"Cutting service and scaling back on cleanliness and safety efforts will only trigger a transit death spiral," the agency's website says. "People will not use BART if they must wait too long for a train or if the experience declines."

Exactly how those cuts could shake out has yet to be determined. But Trost said that, if BART does end up forced to close stations, ridership numbers would be one of the factors officials look at to determine which to shut down.

Notably, the declining ridership at the southern periphery will not affect BART's Silicon Valley extension project, which is funded by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency and will bring service into downtown San Jose. Trost said BART does not have any further expansion plans as of now.

In the first two months of 2025, ridership on the BART system as a whole was slightly higher than in the first two months of 2024, continuing the slow inching upward of ridership each year since the pandemic. But it was still less than half of the ridership in the first two months of 2019, making full ridership recovery a far-off goal.

Local officials are working to find ways to keep the transit agency from having to take the drastic measures that could sink the system entirely. State Sens. Scott Wiener and Jesse Arreguín introduced legislation Monday that authorizes a sales tax measure to be placed on the ballot in up to five Bay Area counties to fund public transit. It would also require those transit agencies to improve their financial efficiency and coordination with other agencies in order to receive that funding.

"If we do nothing, we will see catastrophic service cuts," Wiener said. "When you cut service, more and more people stop riding. That means even more of a reduction in fare revenue, which leads to more service cuts, which leads more people to stop riding. Rinse and repeat."

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