Weekend riders have all but returned to BART's trains. Weekday commuters — the fare base the agency was built on — are still missing by more than half, and that split is the fault line running through a $376 million deficit.

A rider analysis circulating on r/bayarea this week put a sharp number on a trend BART's own data has been showing for months: weekend ridership has climbed back to roughly pre-pandemic levels, while an average weekday still runs at about 46% of fiscal 2019. The agency's structural deficit is, at bottom, a story about which days of the week people ride.

The topline is genuinely good news. In calendar year 2025, BART carried 55.6 million passenger trips, up nearly 10% from 50.7 million in 2024, according to the agency's ridership reports. Average weekday ridership rose to 180,649, and BART logged its best single month since the pandemic this spring.

But the recovery is lopsided by day of week. BART's 2025 averages show Saturday ridership at 108,449 and Sunday at 78,691 — figures that, in the strongest recent months, approach where they sat before COVID emptied downtown offices. Weekdays are the laggard. A rider's breakdown posted to r/bayarea estimated weekday ridership at about 46% of fiscal 2019 in the year that ended June 30, ticking up to 49% since the new fiscal year began, while weekend ridership had returned to roughly 97% of pre-pandemic levels. BART does not dispute the shape of that trend: on its own financial crisis page, the agency writes that riders "are riding less frequently" and that "our ridership mirrors office occupancy" in a region with the highest work-from-home rates in the nation.

That distinction is not academic. BART was engineered as a commuter railroad — five-day-a-week trips into San Francisco and downtown Oakland at peak fares are what its finances assumed. Weekend trips, often shorter and discounted, don't replace that revenue one-for-one even when the raw counts look healthy. So a system whose weekends are booming and whose weekdays are stuck can post rising ridership and a widening hole at the same time.

And it is a wide hole. BART puts its ongoing structural deficit at $350 million to $400 million and pegs the fiscal 2027 gap at $376 million. The emergency pandemic funds that have propped up service are set to run out in 2026. The agency balanced its fiscal 2026 budget with $35 million in ongoing cuts and has spent years trimming — eliminating hundreds of vacant positions, freezing hires, negotiating a 0% union raise one year, and running shorter trains to save $27 million in energy costs. Those shorter trains are now being restored on the busiest days, a tacit acknowledgment that weekend crowds have outgrown the diet.

The rescue plan is a ballot. In October 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 63, authored by state Sens. Scott Wiener and Jesse Arreguín, authorizing a November 2026 regional sales-tax measure across five counties. According to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the tax would raise roughly $980 million a year, and about 60% of the revenue would be dedicated to preserving service at BART, Muni, Caltrain and AC Transit. BART projects it would receive an estimated $310 million annually beginning in fiscal 2028 if voters approve it, plus roughly $74 million in the final quarter of fiscal 2027.

"MTC advocated for the measure to include dedicated funding to make Bay Area transit more affordable, reliable, and easy to use so that it becomes a system that will attract more riders," said Commission Chair and Pleasant Hill Mayor Sue Noack when the bill was signed.

Which points back to the core bet. Weekend ridership shows Bay Area residents will pack a BART train when they have somewhere to be. The open question — the one no sales tax settles — is whether the Tuesday-morning commute ever comes back.