What’s the point of this one weird Muni fare rule?

If you’ve ever been on Muni’s fare page, you’ll notice a very strange fare rule.

Daly City BART Transfer– A free round-trip transfer is provided to all customers transferring from the Daly City BART station to Muni lines serving that station when using Clipper.

But why? It’s strange that this BART station (which isn’t even in San Francisco) is the only place in the entire system that offers a free transfer between BART and Muni. As someone who has a lot of spare time, I decided to do some investigative journalism.

Firstly, I did a quick Google search with “reddit” in the tagline, but couldn’t really find anything except for people confused with the system. So I went on ChatGPT, which stated:

“Daly City Station is just outside of San Francisco city limits (it’s in San Mateo County), but many San Francisco residents use it, especially people in neighborhoods like the Outer Mission or Crocker-Amazon.

To support these residents and encourage public transit use, San Francisco actually pays BART to cover the cost of Muni transfers at Daly City Station.

This agreement allows BART riders exiting at Daly City to get a free Muni ride (on lines like 14R, 28, 54, etc.) to get into or around SF.”

While this statement is mostly true, it doesn’t really justify why. Just because San Francisco residents use the station doesn’t mean Daly City’s riders should receive two free trips – the City’s eight stations don’t get the same treatment. With this information, I stumbled onto Daly City’s Station Access Plan document from December 2002, which finally gave me the answer I was looking for:

• Muni’s Fast Pass (monthly pass) system has an option that covers unlimited BART rides between stations in the city.
  • Note that BART has no monthly passes except for this particular section
• Daly City, being outside of the city, is not covered by the Fast Pass.
• This leads to a disproportionate amount of riders who take Muni to Balboa Park (the next station on the line) instead, overcrowding Balboa Park’s limited parking facilities and connecting bus routes
• As a result, BART and Muni extend this fare benefit to riders as a way to lure San Francisco residents who live nearby to use Daly City, spreading out traffic towards each station’s design capacity.

But why not extend Fast Pass’ station coverage to Daly City? The same report mentions that Daly City’s parking lots would not be able to absorb the extra ridership, and would impact SamTrans ridership to the station. The study ultimately concluded to not extend the benefit to the station – a decision still in place today.

What does this even mean to me?

Not much. It would save me money if I made a trip between Daly City and BART, but that’s a trip I’ve only made twice in my recollection. However, it ultimately does represent how terribly our transit systems interact with each other here in the Bay Area.

The Bay Area’s fare system may be easy to use, but difficult to understand. The 27 transit agencies across the nine counties of the Bay Area all have different fare structures, and none of them mesh well enough to understand the mish-mash of fare discounts and transfer rules. Clipper 2.0 is supposed to fix many of these problems (like the inability to provide discounted BART transfers), but we need to eventually create a unified fare system that equitably distributes cost between riders and most importantly, is easy to understand for riders.