BART to Offer Late-Night Service

BART still won't let you stick around for last call

​Earlier this month, we posed this question: What could BART general manager Dorothy Dugger's $1 million payout buy us? Well, BART just gave us the answer -- late-night service for six months!

The Examiner reports that BART is considering the much-desired and long-overdue after-hours service extension, but at the high price of $1.2 million. Which, of course, is only $200,000 more than what the agency gave Dugger on her way out the door -- minus the flowers.
Right now, weekend trains stop at 12:30 a.m., which puts San Francisco's night owls in a bind. It's even worse for those of us who live in Oakland and party in the city.  But under a new proposal, BART would run Saturday night trains until last call -- 1:30 a.m.

After working out the logistics -- rescheduling nighttime maintenance on the tunnels and hiring part-time operators -- the extended service would start in September for a six-month trial, according to the Ex.

Although there is a Facebook page with more than 23,000 people supporting the extended hours, late-night service would ironically mean that BART loses passengers.

How is this possible? Well BART says the extra nighttime hour means it would have to delay service by an hour on Saturday mornings. So trains would start running at 7 instead of 6. BART projects that 2,600 riders would use the extended service, yet 2,900 passengers board the train between 6 and 7 a.m. on Saturdays.

Do the math, and you will see that late-night service could result in a loss of 300 passengers for BART.

But as BART director Robert Raburn astutely notes, "It makes sense that we don't force people to leave the encore performance of the show."

Of course, who needs an encore when you have a BART ride to entertain you?

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