BART Yellow Line

BART's longest line in one cab ride: from San Francisco airport under the city and the Bay, through the Berkeley Hills and out to the Contra Costa suburbs.

The route

The Yellow Line is the San Francisco Bay Area's diagonal: it starts at San Francisco International Airport, runs north up the Peninsula and under the heart of San Francisco, crosses beneath the Bay to Oakland, then tunnels through the Berkeley Hills and heads east across Contra Costa County to Antioch. Including the eBART extension it covers about 100 km, which makes it the longest journey on the BART network and a good way to see how the region fits together.

The line's East Bay section was among the first parts of BART to open: trains began running between Concord and MacArthur in May 1973, and the Transbay Tube joined the East Bay to San Francisco in September 1974. Pittsburg/Bay Point followed in 1996. The final stretch to Antioch, opened in 2018, is eBART, which uses different trains and track from the rest of BART, so riders change at a cross-platform stop just east of Pittsburg/Bay Point.

Today the line carries a mix of air travellers, downtown commuters and suburban families. In the East Bay much of the track sits in the median of freeways, first Highway 24 and later State Route 4, a cheap way to find a right of way through built-up land that means the train often runs alongside traffic rather than through back gardens.

What you will see

The ride opens in the airport station and soon heads north through the Peninsula suburbs to Daly City, and soon afterwards the line goes underground. From there it follows the Mission Street subway and then the Market Street subway beneath downtown San Francisco. Civic Center and Embarcadero are deep, busy underground stations; watch how the platforms grow more crowded as the train nears the financial district.

After Embarcadero comes the Transbay Tube, a long, straight run in the dark under San Francisco Bay, with the train settling into a steady high speed. It surfaces near West Oakland on an elevated track with views over the port and freeways, then goes back under downtown Oakland. Around Rockridge the train runs between the lanes of Highway 24 before entering the Berkeley Hills Tunnel.

On the far side of the hills, at Orinda, the landscape changes completely: dry, rounded hills, oak trees and spread-out towns such as Lafayette and Walnut Creek. The line carries on past Concord into flatter, more open country. At Pittsburg/Bay Point look for the switch to eBART, whose smaller trains run down the middle of State Route 4 for the last miles to Antioch.

Riding it for real

BART is an everyday metro, so there is nothing to book: you pay per trip by distance, using a Clipper card or a phone wallet at the fare gates, and trains run frequently through the day. The airport station is the simplest place to start, and riding the whole line end to end is an easy, cheap way to see the Bay Area from San Francisco to the inland valleys.

Sit near the front of the first car for the best forward view, and allow extra time at Pittsburg/Bay Point for the change to eBART. Service patterns change in the evenings and at weekends, so check BART's website or app for current timetables and fares before you go.

The video is embedded from YouTube and remains on its owner’s channel. Views count toward the original video.