San Francisco Pride Parade powers busy day for BART ridership

Bay Area Rapid Transit kept it moving during Sunday’s busy San Francisco Pride celebration despite an evening skirmish that briefly closed a Downtown San Francisco station.

“BART on Sunday carried 140,006 trips. That’s 6,000 more trips than Pride ’22 and 117% of pre-COVID ridership projections for a June Sunday,” the agency tweeted Monday morning.

“It was BART’s busiest Sunday since the arrival of the pandemic. Thanks to everyone who rode BART to Pride!”

The transit agency’s post-pandemic peak remains this month’s total of 189,716 riders on June 13.

The transit agency opened its doors at 8 a.m. Sunday, running extra trains to accommodate parade crowds and urging riders to use Clipper Cards on cell phones or smartwatches.

The agency had anticipated its heaviest ridership would come in Downtown San Francisco at its Embarcadero station from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and its Civic Center station from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. for events including the parade and the People’s March.

After heated tempers on the Civic Center Station platform around 7:10 p.m. led to fights involving pepper spray that led to a partially shattered train window on at least one car, BART staff closed the station from about 7:20 p.m. until 8 p.m.

A BART spokesman confirmed late Monday morning that police arrested a 20-year-old Antioch man on that station’s platform on suspicion of an assault charge. The man, who did not possess valid media, was issued a prohibition order and booked into San Francisco County Jail.

Trains also rode through West Oakland Station for what BART called crowd mitigation from about 7:55 p.m. until nearly 8:30 a.m.

According to BART ridership statistics, 147,545 riders used the system Friday to reach gatherings including the Trans March, hitting 36% of baseline capacity, while 110,343 riders used BART on Saturday to attend events including the Dyke March, hitting 71% of the system’s baseline capacity.