BART running longer trains during peak commute times

BART STARTING THIS MORNING DESIGNED TO MAKE YOUR MORNING COMMUTE BETTER. DEVON TRUBY JOINS US LIVE FROM BARCADERO STATION WHERE WE'LL BE SEEING A LOT OF THESE CHANGES TAKE PLACE. DEVON, GOOD MORNING. Good morning to you both. Changes already in effect for our morning commuters as the red, yellow, green and blue lines are seeing longer trains for your morning commute and for your afternoon commute. Now this does mean that we're going to see some shorter trains at non-peak times. And the orange line is not getting this boost because BART says it's just not used as much. BART hasn't had 10 car trains for the last 6 years so this is a big increase. What does it mean? For the yellow line, 8 of the busiest morning trains and 6 of the busiest afternoon trains will be increased to 10 cars. The red line is going from 6 or 8 cars to 10 now at peak times. And for the green line, 2 additional morning trains towards San Francisco are going to get a 2 car bump. And the blue line will also see a longer train in the afternoon. That's a good thing. I think BART riders are beginning to come back. Companies are now asking employees to come back to work now. I know they've started that this year. So you're getting more employees to come back more days of the week. In that setting, more BART riders are getting on BART. So we need longer trains to accommodate the people. Coming up in August, changes to your ride time. Green and blue lines, instead of being on the 3 and 17 minutes, moving to the 8 and 12. Yellow and red line trains now spaced out 10 minutes apart instead of 5 and 15 minutes. These longer trains will carry over into that schedule change on August 10th. If you remember back in February, all the transit agencies got together for what they called the Big Sync to align their schedules for better connectivity. So August is the next iteration of that. The agency says all this is happening as ridership in June was up almost 19 percent compared to the same time last year. Fiscal year just ended for them, and they outperformed the previous year by 13 percent. BART credits this to big sporting events like the World Cup and celebrations like San Francisco Pride where they said they saw 30,000 more people using public transportation for Pride that weekend in comparison to the same time last year. However, in comparison to pre-pandemic, BART ridership numbers still only back to about 56 percent of those 2019 numbers. All this is happening is in November. They're going to be asking you to vote for a pro-sales tax that will give public transportation agencies more money. So big changes on the way to close out the summer. Reporting live in San Francisco, Devin Truby, KTVU, Fox 2 News. Devin, thank you. 8.35 here at 8.