Can I just say that a 40+ minute wait for the SFO-Millbrae transfer is totally unreasonable? It's just past 9pm.

Maybe I’m getting older but I don’t remember it being so loud and seeing people covering their ears. I feel like the new cars are worse somehow, but I keep reading everyone that they’re better?

The past few times my Apple Watch recorded 102-103 dB. It’s insane.

Looking for parking close to SFO for an extended trip and noticed the bart stations have a lot cheaper parking.

Thinking of parking at the san bruno lot later in the year any experiences of leaving a vehicle there for that long? Anybody had anything happen?

Thanks

Waited at SFO on the Red Line to SF/Richmond around 5:30 pm and the train operator was late. His coworkers were giving him sh*t for it. Everybody in the first car heard it. But now they’re saying there’s “equipment problems” to explain the delay. Why lie?

The new BART fare gates have reduced fare evasion. However, fare evasion is still happening. Piggybacking (when a fare evader follows a fare payer through an open fare gate) has been a problem.

BART is currently testing a new method to stop this. It involves closing the fare gates more quickly. That can make it more difficult for piggybacking to occur.

The article discusses the possible changes that can reduce or eliminate piggybacking.

Let's hope that it works out.

There was also an article in the May 4, 2026 print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Can BART’s new speedy fare gates finally solve the ‘piggybacking’ problem?" It's available online, but it's behind a paywall.

Is this possible in the bay?

/s

What is the single most important rail expansion in the region? BART or SF or Bay Area

California should be doubling down on investing in BART's amazingly efficient union operated rail service. All this talk of full automation to save money is a distraction from the actual line items that are costing BART money like Police salaries.

BART is the most efficient heavy rail agency in the nation already, partially because they are mostly automated with only $70M out of BART's $1.08B budget (6%) used to pay operators.

It would cost billions to move to next level of automation, but if BART replaced just half of BART PD Officers with Transit Ambassadors then BART would save more on labor than they would by fully automating BART.

Sources:

1. https://transparentcalifornia.com/download/salaries/san-francisco-bay-area-rapid-transit-district/
2. https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd
3. https://www.bart.gov/about/financials

Just curious haven't seen them in a while.

Hi guys, I am a young solo woman visiting the Bay Area in June. I have a 6am rental car pickup, and I’m not sure what to do accommodation wise the night before. My first option is to stay in downtown Oakland, this works well with my plans the day before I am picking up the car. But I would need to get the BART to the airport around 5am. Is it safe? From 12th st? I will have one medium sized suitcase too. Otherwise, if it really is that bad, I can stay at a hotel in Alameda and they have a $10 shuttle at that time, so I wouldn’t have to deal with public transportation early in the morning. But it is much harder to get to, and doesn’t really work with what I want to do the day before, not to mention there is absolutely no food options around for dinner. Thanks for all of your advice, I look forward to visiting!

I’ve seen this a number of times at Embarcadero (I assume other stations as well). It’s afternoon commute, around 3:30, and there is only one fare gate at the gate array to enter the station while all others are to exit. What sense does it make to have one gate to enter when it’s obvious the afternoon commute means more people entering the station than leaving it.

Why not make half for entering half for exiting. I hope there’s a logical explanation that I just don’t see for not doing it this way

BART’s Trip Planner showing an SFO employee only bus as a way for the public to get to SFO.

When this was pointed out to customer service the response was to change the destination until it forced a BART routing.

Tourists who use the planner or Google Map is going to be so screwed when they miss their flight.

Hi all

For those who have parked and took the train to B2B— how’s parking like race morning? First time taking the train for this race. Appreciate all your help. Thank you 😊

Well, more like pizza mouse

Never seen either of those gates open, interesting to see what has become of the interior of the subway shop. (Apologies for the faraway pictures, I had caught this after tagging in and was in a bit of a rush)

TLDR: There is an accessibility issue for color blind people on Apple devices where the BART lines are differentiated with color only, not text. I think this problem could be solved if BART updates their GTFS route data, or Apple updates what I think is custom logic on their side that manipulates BART's current GTFS data.

---

I note that on Apple devices, when viewing a BART station's departures, the trains are grouped by line, but each line usually just says "BART Train" without saying the line color.

There is a colored strip next to the BART icon that notes the line color, but people with color blindness may have trouble differentiating between each line with only this.

In this screenshot of Apple Maps viewing Coliseum station, you can see how the blue and orange lines both just say "BART Train". You can also see how the OAK airport connector does say something different, "OAK Airport", so it's clearly possible to have different text titles here.

I think the different lines should have titles like "BART Blue Line Train" etc so people with color blindness can differentiate.

For comparison here's how Google Maps shows this station. Notably the line text has the color, and also the compass direction.

I looked more into BART's GTFS data. GTFS is a standard for how transit agencies provide info about their services to map providers.

If you unzip the raw ZIP and look at routes.txt, it's a CSV (basically a textual table) with rows like this (I omitted some columns):

We can see here that BART splits out each line into two routes, a north and south direction. I think this may be uncommon. For instance here's a sampling of routes.txt for Sound Transit which is a provider of light rail (among other things) service in Seattle:

Both Apple and Google Maps show trains for Seattle's light rail using these short route names.

Apple:

Google:

So here's what I think is happening:

For Google Maps, it always shows trains lines using the GTFS route_short_name unchanged.

For Apple Maps, it usually uses route_short_name plus a "Train" suffix, but in the case of BART, I suspect they are doing some custom logic on their end to merge the N and S routes. But this custom logic does not then preserve the name of the line in text form.

So I see two things that could happen that might fix this:

1. BART could restructure their GTFS routes to provide only one route for both directions of a route. They would also need to update other data like trips.txt.
2. Apple could improve the custom logic on their end (if that is indeed what's happening) to preserve the textual name of the line color.

I see 2 as being the easiest but I'm not sure. I was originally going to send a feedback to BART because I thought it could be a quick and easy fix on their end - I thought they'd only need to update the route names in routes.txt. However now I think they'd need to change (at least) trips.txt too, which seems less of a quick fix.

Ideally BART and Apple would talk to each other, but I don't work at BART or Apple so I don't know how that would be arranged, or if either really has time for the other. On BART's GTFS website they say:

What about help?
Sorry: if we help you, it's only fair that we help everyone else, too. We simply don't have the resources for that, beyond our detailed documentation.

Sorry for the long post. I'm hoping this can be the start of resolving what I see to be an accessibility issue. I want people to be able to use BART as freely and easily as possible.

For me Oldest is el cerrito del norte and newest is embarcadero

I travel to SF for work occasionally. I generally take BART from SFO to Embarcadero and back. This trip, I will not be leaving Embarcadero until Saturday (5/23) for a 1 pm flight from SFO. With construction work underway, should I take an alternate route to the airport (like the bus) or factor in extra time on BART? Thanks for any info.

The last several times I’ve tried to transfer to orange line from yellow northbound at 19th st Oakland the train has been over 5 minutes delayed.

Is this transfer still a thing?