Oakland deserves another BART station
Midcentury transit systems often skipped over dense urban neighborhoods like San Antonio in Oakland. It’s time to fix that mistake.
The nearly three-mile ride from Lake Merritt Station to Fruitvale Station is one of the most visually interesting stretches of the BART system. Beside the tracks are a jumble of Victorian houses, industrial complexes, and new affordable housing developments. On the other side is the 880, often clogged with traffic, which BART trains satisfyingly zoom past.
But this stimulating view is problematic for the people who live and work in San Antonio, Clinton, Little Saigon and other neighborhoods in this section of Oakland. BART rolls through, but does not serve, this community.
It’s one of the most egregious examples of 1960s transit planners skipping over low-income Black and brown urban neighborhoods in order to better serve white suburban commuters. Now, more and more transit agencies are realizing their mistake.
My latest piece in CityLab looks at the growing trend of transit systems building “infill” stations on existing stretches of track. My focus is Atlanta, where Mayor Andre Dickens has pledged to build four infill stations in fast-growing neighborhoods in the core of the city, close to the popular BeltLine trail. It’s an exciting plan — though some Atlantans are skeptical that the city and its transit agency, MARTA, can make it work.
Atlanta is far from alone in this quest. Back in Oakland, a group of activists are in the early stages of a campaign to build a new BART station in the San Antonio neighborhood, roughly halfway between Lake Merritt Station and Fruitvale Station.
The campaign has already gathered nearly 1,000 signatures in support of the concept, and is beginning to reach out to elected officials, organizers Youngchae Lee, Ben Matlaw, and Sara Rowley told me.
They rattle off several specific reasons why Oakland’s San Antonio neighborhood should get a BART station. This is the longest stretch of BART tracks in an urban area (defined as Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco) without a station. That’s despite the fact that this is one of most densely populated neighborhoods in the region, with about 16,000 residents per square mile. Immediately adjacent to the new station location, at the intersection of 14th Ave. and 12th St., there are lots of low-slung industrial lots that could be great candidates for future housing development.
Just across the 880 from the future station location, the massive 3,700-unit Brooklyn Basin project is under construction on the waterfront. For now, this high-density neighborhood has poor transit, walking and biking access, and feels isolated from the rest of Oakland. San Antonio Station, and the new freeway crossing the project includes, would change that.
There are also more general reasons why infill stations are a good idea. Suburban nine-to-five commuters are a fickle ridership base, especially in the age of remote work. Transit performs best in dense urban neighborhoods, where a significant proportion of people don’t have cars, and where businesses, offices, schools, healthcare, and entertainment are within relatively close proximity. In these places, people use transit for all manner of trips — not just commutes downtown.
As my CityLab story describes, midcentury transit network design, with wide stop spacing and suburbs-to-downtown focused service, was a profound historical mistake. These design choices are a big reason why Great Society-era metros in Atlanta, Baltimore, and Miami never reached their potential. BART has fared better, but could have been even more successful with a greater focus on dense urban neighborhoods.
Of the Great Society-era systems, only DC Metro has comprehensive service in the urban core. That’s a big reason why ridership there is at 83% of pre-pandemic levels, compared to 45% for BART. Urban-focused systems are far more resilient to economic and social transformations than suburban-oriented systems.
Planners at BART understand this. One concept being studied for the Link21 project to add a second transbay rail tunnel between Oakland and San Francisco includes a new station at San Antonio. Link 21 could also create the potential for a new rail line down Geary Boulevard in San Francisco — an extremely busy transit corridor that BART should have served long ago.
In addition to joining up with the Link21 project, the San Antonio Station campaigners are hoping to get funding from the Bay Area’s planned 2026 transit funding measure. The group is currently fundraising for a feasibility study to make their case. They may have a powerful ally in Signature Group, the developer of Brooklyn Basin, which signaled its support of the new station in a Facebook post. But getting on the 2026 ballot measure’s spending plan could be a tough ask, given the many competing agencies and projects depending on it.
Though generally cheaper than building new transit extensions, infill stations can also be expensive and complex. A recently completed infill station on the DC Metro system in Alexandria, Virginia, cost $370 million. Though it has the advantage of being on a street-level section of track, the San Antonio Station would be constructed in an even more space-constrained environment, requiring extensive coordination with Union Pacific, whose tracks run directly adjacent to BART. (Sound familiar?) In order to serve Brooklyn Basin and the Oakland waterfront, the station would necessitate a new bridge over the UP tracks and the 880, another challenging undertaking.
But, in the end, the benefits to current residents, future residents, and the BART system could be huge. America’s most successful infill station, to date, is NoMa/ Gallaudet University on DC Metro’s Red Line, just north of Union Station. Like the San Antonio neighborhood, NoMa sits just outside of the city’s downtown core, and was previously characterized by a patchwork of industrial buildings and rowhouses. The project was funded in part by a special assessment on neighboring property owners, who have been on a building spree since the station opened in 2004. Since then, 6,000 homes and 12 million square feet of office space have been built around the station, which has become one of the highest-ridership stations on the Metro system.
If BART could replicate even a fraction of that success at San Antonio, the initial investment in the construction of the new station would quickly pay off.
Great piece. As a native of Oakland, I appreciated the historic context of how BART bypassed communities of color and greatly contributed to the widening economic and social gap between much of the city and its surrounding suburbs.
Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for posting, Benjamin.