When Los Angeles shuttered its last streetcar in 1963, the Bay Area was already planting the seeds of BART, the expansive rail system that embodies a common refrain in the longstanding competition between Southern and Northern California: Angelenos are gas-guzzlers stuck in parking-lot traffic, while the Bay Area has built an enviable transit network.
But over the past two and a half years, the Bay Area’s claim to California’s mass transit throne has been deeply eroded, if not undone. L.A. now has more people riding buses, light rails and trains than the Bay Area. And even when accounting for the Bay Area’s far smaller population, L.A.’s per-capita transit ridership temporarily surpassed its Northern California neighbor for the first time in at least two decades.
How big was the turnaround? In 2019, transit riders in six Bay Area counties took 43 million more trips than L.A. County, which is over a third larger by population. But in 2021, Los Angeles racked up over 83 million more transit trips than the Bay Area – a staggering threefold reversal, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of federal data for the two regions’ largest transit agencies.
