BART (Official) Reviews

BARTOfficial has simplified my whole life. The online paying for parking is so easy to use. Every single day I had to pay $3 for parking & the machine ONLY accepts cash and if you don’t have exactly $3 they give you ONLY coins AND the machine doesn’t accept coins so basically the whole week you’re just walking around with a ton of quarters accumulating in your pocket (one time it gave me all dimes & 1 nickel and I almost snapped, also that’s def not the right amount of change but what am I gonna do, ask for 5 cents back?) and it is so awful. I am gen z and hate cash & hate going to the bank to get cash for the sole reason of parking at BART. My only complaint is that I thought it was offered for every station so when I went to another station I didn’t pay. Luckily I did not get a ticket but beware!!

BARTOfficial appears to be an attempt at merging several different apps that address different issues: Schedule, Live ETA of train arrivals, hazards reporting, and advisories/outages. It’s a good initiative but it experiences issues on all of those attempts.
The scheduler and live ETA don’t work well after midnight but BART has trains up to an hour past midnight, so it is rough there. It also only provides ETA down to minutes while other apps like BARTPro provide updates down to seconds and are also hooked to the BART API for accuracy.
Advisory and outages are okay, it’s about 80% accurate for reporting escalator outages, but not perfect.
Hazards reporting is the worst, I have received no confirmation or replies each time I’ve reporting incidents from finding people taking residence in elevators to exposed injectable needles lying on seats. At least you would get a confirmation and often a live response back from a person when reporting via BART Watch app, so I’m not sure if my reports are going through.
All in all, it’s a good initiative but BARTOfficial is mostly not usable compared to other more reliable apps at this time for the different features.

I'm confused by all the negative reviews. Maybe they updated it recently? It does exactly what I need it to do: show me the train schedule for the station I want. Nice that it automatically finds the nearest station, makes it easier. I might use the trip planner occasionally for trips I take that aren't my commute. And I like that the advisories sure up on the home screen. One slight nit, I liked that the web site automatically refreshed when I switched to it on my iPhone, but every 15 seconds is just fine for me. Great job, impressive app, not just for a public organization, but any developer!

In the “Plan Trip” menu, BARTOfficial needs an alphabetical list of stations to automatically appear as choices under the search bubble. The webpage app used to do something similar to this. I don’t want to type into the search bar and have to frantically guess at the correct name of the station that I want to depart from or arrive at, but I can always easily find it in a list.

The trip planner would be way easier and more efficient if I could just look at the standard BART route map and pick a starting station and a destination station from it before anything else.

Also, when trip results come up, I see that connected bus route numbers/letters are immediately visible but if I want to know what BART route it is I have to click to see another screen. Shouldn’t the name of the BART route show up on the first screen the same as the bus numbers?

The parking feature is great (though I wish I could just pay for parking and not have value “saved” in a wallet as I rarely park). I don’t understand why BARTOfficial asks me for location access every single time I open it even though I have it set to Never in my iPhone settings. Really not okay and Apple needs to force them to stop asking. The closest station feature is super annoying too since I don’t have location turned on, it just shows me 12th Street Oakland as my closest station, though I never use that station. It would be nice to be able to turn it off. I can understand where it’s useful in some circumstances but not for most regular riders who are going to set their favorites.

Update service advisories. I’ve just been inconvenienced because my normal station was closed due to police activity. There are announcements at the bart station which is too late because I’m already there versus taking an Uber or a bus to a different station...and checking BARTOfficial their service advisories COMPLETELY BLANK!!!! What the hell is the point. Of a service advisory section of its not updated...

Complete waste of memory on my phone as it is.

It’s great the developers want to cover all bases, but the default for a BART app should be BART only trips ... station to station with drop down menus to choose the station; times between trains for transfers, notification for alerts, etc. Making this the default will aid usability for those of us that want simple BART leave and arrive times; users who want more complicated trips can choose what they want covered in a connectind link. Doing this will also mean that users who just want BART only don’t have to sign up in order to get easily available results. An all things to all people home page is not a good design option for a BART official app.

Also, BARTOfficial is vertical only on the ipad; I’m hoping the developers will find that an easy fix and go ahead and fix it right away.

Paying for parking is way more of an effort than it should be. It’s advertised that you can take care of it with your Clipper card but there isn’t any apparent way to actually do it. The standard toll booths where you pay for transit don’t include ability to pay for parking. Turns out we had to enter the paid area to locate the parking toll booths. Then you find out that they only accept cash. What?? We entered our parking spot number and were directed to deposit $3.00 in cash. At the spot where you enter bills there was a note that said “NO BILLS”. Crazy. We shifted over to the next parking toll booth and was able to get it paid, just as we heard our train depart. In summary, it’s too difficult to pay for parking!!!

I was really excited BART released an official app, however BARTOfficial fails to deliver the basic functionality I expect from a transit agency. I am able to see a departures list, but after tapping a departure I can’t see which stations a train will go to and what times it will arrive. I tried to use the trip planner but it gave me nonsensical results until I checked another mapping app that told me about a service advisory affecting normal routes (fortunately the trip planner was taking this into account). Finally, it doesn’t feel at home on iOS at all; must have been developed with some non-native cross platform framework that messes with scrolling and stuff. I hope BART is able to take this feedback and improve BARTOfficial in the future.

Why roll out a new app when it is so flawed?
-Planning a trip is extremely cumbersome—can’t just plan a trip from one station to the other, it wants you to input actual addresses from point A to point B (you’re not Google Maps so don’t try to be).
-No notifications of delays!! Seriously? What’s even the point of BARTOfficial if there’s no notification function to alert me of delays or station closures?? I want be be able to make an informed decision about my method of transport—not find out when I arrive that the station is closed (e.g. Monday, April 8, 2019 during the morning closures of Richmond-El Cerrito stations).
-My advice: stay far away from BARTOfficial or delete the official bart app and use the 3rd party app. BARTOfficial is useless.

I’m currently using BARTOfficial on an iPhone 10S Max and also on iPhone 11 Pro Max and it has worked flawlessly so far. Doesn’t crash, trip planning works fine. Based on your location it automatically detects which station is closest to you and shows the next train coming for each platform.

It works as it should. I think the recent updates they made worked out nicely.

Ok so this is a bart app while I get you’re trying to be helpful.. do I need to see every location option in the valley?? I’m planning a trip so I’m typing “C-A-S-T-R-o” I want station and get 15 million options for Castro street & this l, Street & That.. Can’t the the actual Bart stations be top result PLEASE. BARTOfficial doesn’t live update either.. say if it’s one of the Sundays where the bart is a mess and you’re being forced to transfer at 12th and Oakland ... and they decide to move the sf train to a different platform (there’s 4 at 12th) you’d never know til it’s too darn late via BARTOfficial . And can we please please have a better push for trip updates?!

Appreciate your team’s hard work on this. Definitely more features that can be added (as detailed in many other reviews), but this is a great starting point, and delivers immediate value from the first screen.

The real-time departures don’t update fast enough. Train had pulled out of station for a minute or two but BARTOfficial was still stuck at 2 minutes to arrival. Another instance I come down to a train waiting but BARTOfficial said that train had already left. The web app’s real-time departures are much more accurate, up-to-date, and can be manually refreshed.
And what’s with only allowing 3 favorite stations?

BARTOfficial should convert to local time zone. For example, I’m currently landing at SFO and my phone will still be on EST until I regain cell service. When I went to ‘plan a trip’, it showed me route options starting around 10:30pm pst, but I’m landing around 7:20pm pst. It’s nice that BARTOfficial is intuitive enough to show options in the near future based in the system time of the phone, but it needs to be corrected to convert the time based on the time zone setting of the users phone.

I had a wonderful surprise this morning when I was looking to pay for early bird parking. The parking part of BARTOfficial has improved greatly! Now we can pay for parking at the Pittsburg station anytime, it’s not limited to Early Birdbird before 5:30am anymore. You’re good as long as you have your Clippercard attached to your parking app to prove that you paid for Bart fare. No more paper tickets necessary. Way to go BART!!!

BARTOfficial can be very useful, when it works at its best. However, there have been times (once in every 5-8 tries) when the “Plan trip” function goes dead. Attempts to find an alternate navigation tactic have all been unsuccessful. Recently, I had to delete and reinstall BARTOfficial , to schedule a trip the next day. Many persons do not have the luxury of having that much time to plan a trip. BART, you can do better than that!

3rd party apps are better than this. When I use the trip planner feature I want a simple point A to Point B, maybe including BART transfers. When I tried to do a simple trip planner from Rockridge to Del Norte it gave me a complicated trip including walking somewhere, taking Bart a few stops, getting off walking again then taking the 57 bus only to walk and get back on Bart again to get to my destination. It should’ve just been Rockridge to MacArthur to Del Norte. This is ridiculous.

Well intended and poorly executed.

My simple ride from 12th Street to Pleasant Hill is mapped out to include a trip on the Richmond line with a transfer at 19th street instead of just waiting for the Antioch bound train. That’s some great programming right there. Did anyone who actually use the system help develop it?

What is sad is that there are other apps out there, better than this, but BART likely developed this from scratch. Because why think clearly when you can just write a check?

I have monthly parking but am unable to see parking payment t history in app because it states some error and has done so for months. I am unable to input my license plate and unable to change between the two clipper cards I have stored in app when I enter the station to show I am officially parked. Therefore, I constantly receive needless, annoying parking citations at the Antioch Bart station.

BART should either dramatically improve the cellular data coverage in their underground stations (especially along Market Street at rush hour), or update BARTOfficial to be able to work offline, at least for schedules/trip planning. (One’s probably easier and quicker than the other!)

Otherwise, it’s a pretty decent app.

My biggest wishlist feature item is to use BARTOfficial instead of a physical clipper card to ride the bart. Also to add $$ to my account from BARTOfficial . If you need an example, look at the starbucks app.
I believe in you devs! You can do it!!!

It's a great start but needs an Apple Watch app. It will complete BARTOfficial . We are barely getting BARTOfficial in 2019 so I'm not holding my breath for an Apple Watch any time soon