BART just had its busiest day in more than six years. The agency's daily ridership log shows 254,248 paid exits on Tuesday, Oct. 6, the highest single-day count it has recorded since the pandemic emptied trains in 2020.
BART posts these numbers by hand each weekday and labels them preliminary, so the figure could still be revised. But the jump is clear. The previous post-pandemic high was 242,090 trips on Tuesday, Sept. 15, a record BART highlighted in a press release the following day. Tuesday's count beat it by about 12,000 riders, or roughly 5%.
A steady climb, not a one-off
The longer trend is just as striking. On the comparable Tuesday a year ago, Oct. 7, 2025, BART counted 217,276 exits, so this week's peak was about 17% higher. Weekday counts above 240,000 used to be rare; in late September they became routine, with three straight days in that range from Sept. 22 to Sept. 24.
BART hasn't said what drove Tuesday's spike in particular. In its September release, the agency tied its broader ridership gains to better reliability, cleaner and safer stations, and new fare gates. It reported that riders reached their destinations on time 95% of the time in the April-to-June quarter, a record, and that customer satisfaction hit 91.4%, the highest since it began tracking the measure. Crimes against riders per million trips, BART said, have fallen 67% since the end of 2024.
"A safe and clean BART is no longer an aspiration," General Manager Bob Powers said in that release.
Why the numbers matter right now
The record lands about four weeks before voters in five counties decide on the Regional Transit Measure, a sales tax that would be 1% in San Francisco and half a percent in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. As KALW reported, it's expected to raise close to $1 billion a year for 14 years for BART, Muni, Caltrain and smaller operators.
Supporters say the money is needed to avoid what they call catastrophic service cuts, including the possible closure of 15 BART stations and 20 Muni lines. Rising ridership is part of their pitch: more riders means more fare revenue, and a system people are returning to.
Even with this week's record, BART's ridership is still rebuilding toward where it was before 2020, and fares alone don't cover the system's costs. That gap is exactly what the November measure is about.