Bay Area Transit Equity#
Group 13: Sonya Kiskachi, Destiny Ogu, Donjhai Holland | CP 255 | Spring 2026
Does where you live near transit determine what you can access?
Bay Area transit expansion has extended BART and Caltrain service into communities like Antioch and Berryessa over the past decade. However, building a station does not guarantee that the surrounding neighborhood offers basic amenities that residents may need within walking distance.
A station that draws hundreds to thousands of daily riders but sits in a neighborhood with few nearby amenities (such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and clinics) creates compounded mobility burdens, with direct implications for transit-oriented development and equitable service planning. The riders most affected are transit-dependent Bay Area residents, particularly low-income households, elderly riders, and people with disabilities, who rely on transit not just for commuting but for reaching daily necessities.
This project examines walkable amenity access across 79 BART and Caltrain stations in the Bay Area. We ask a simple question: Do riders at peripheral stations have systematically worse access to essential services like grocery stores, clinics, and pharmacies compared to riders at central core stations?
Why this matters now#
BART’s Antioch extension opened in 2023, adding two new stations to the East Bay. Caltrain electrification finished in 2024, expanding capacity along the Peninsula. Both are presented as equity wins: more transit access for underserved communities. But a 2024 MTC report on transit-oriented communities found that station-area development is concentrated in already-wealthy corridors, leaving newly served communities with the infrastructure but not the services. Our analysis puts numbers to that gap for the first time across both systems.
Key Findings#
Our analysis finds statistically significant disparities between core and peripheral stations:
Data Sources#
We built this analysis primarily using FY2025 BART and Caltrain ridership records, OpenStreetMap amenity extracts, and 2024 ACS 5-year Census estimates.
| Dataset | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Census tract boundaries | TIGER/Line 2024, U.S. Census Bureau | California tract shapefiles for spatial joining |
| ACS 2024 (5-Year) | Census API | Tract-level demographics: income, vehicle access, race, poverty |
| BART ridership (FY2025) | BART monthly XLS, Jul 2024–Jun 2025 | Average weekday exits by station |
| Caltrain ridership (FY2025) | FY2025 Annual Ridership Report, Table 3 | Average mid-week ridership (AMWR) by station |
| Amenities | OpenStreetMap / compiled | Grocery, park, clinic, pharmacy, hospital, childcare locations |
| Station locations | Compiled | Lat/lon for all BART and Caltrain stations |
All spatial analysis was done in Python using GeoPandas, with interactive visualizations built in Plotly and Folium.
Scope and Limitations#
This analysis measures amenity presence, not affordability, quality, or hours. We cover only BART and Caltrain. Bay Area bus networks are out of scope. For a full discussion of missing data and methodological limitations, see Station Access Explorer.
Conclusion#
Building a station is not enough. What gets built around it matters too.
Core stations average more than twice as many nearby amenities as peripheral stations (21.9 vs. 9.8), a difference that is statistically significant across 6 of 10 amenity categories after FDR correction. The biggest gaps are in clinics and convenience stores. These are everyday essentials that transit-dependent riders cannot easily substitute with a car trip.
The unmet need index reveals that some nominally core stations such as Coliseum, Bay Fair, MacArthur, serve some of the most transit-dependent populations in the network while having among the fewest walkable services. The gap follows racial geography (rho = −0.243) more than income (rho = −0.064, not significant), which means policies targeting low-income neighborhoods by income threshold alone would miss many of the communities most affected.
Where to go next