Effects of BART on Work Journeys in the Bay Area

This paper analyzes work journey patterns in the Bay Area before and since the 71-mile BART began service, and assesses BART-provided improvements in transit accessibility to employment centers. Current journey-to-work BART ridership is analyzed as a share of the total journey-to-work travel market, both areawide and in the key transbay commute corridor between San Francisco and Oakland. BART now serves 135,000 one-way trips each weekday, two-thirds of these to and from work. BART's share of area-wide work trips is only about 5%, and since half of BART's ridership has come from bus, the impact on the overall automobile/transit modal split has been small. However, BART has been more successful in the travel market it was primarily designed to serve: long-distance commute trips from the suburbs to the central cities. BART carries 27% of all work trips from residences in the BART service area taking 35 min or more.