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BART Ridership Still Only 22% of 2019 Numbers

Riders took 2.25 million trips this July – up 2x from a year ago – but still well below pre-pandemic numbers
By - posted 8/10/2021 No Comment

By Olivia Wynkoop Bay City News Foundation

Bay Area Rapid Transit ridership numbers are coming back to pre-COVID levels slowly but steadily, according to its latest ridership report.

Riders took 2.25 million trips this July, according to the report, which analyzes ridership numbers from the past year. This only makes up 22 percent of BART’s pre-pandemic numbers, but it’s double the amount of rides the service saw in August 2020.

This data doesn’t reflect BART’s recent increase in services, which in its first week, did not make an impact on ridership numbers, nor the recent impacts of the COVID-19 Delta variant.

After the July report was published, BART announced a new Saturday ridership record for 2021 on August 7 with 56,111 exits – which was 36% of pre-pandemic riderships.

Ridership levels are slightly higher than the initial forecast for 2022, but analysts still “heed caution with over-interpretation,” SFBART said on Twitter.

“They read Bay Area reached widespread vaccination milestone earlier than projected but future remains very uncertain, [especially] with Delta,” BART said.

More ridership data and analysis can be found at https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership.

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