The anti-Trump protests at San Francisco International Airport last weekend drew an estimated 10,000 riders to the BART system and broke the record for Sunday ridership.
Ridership counts provided by the BART Communications Department show that 16,079 passengers exited the SFO station during the weekend of January 28–29. The average number of passengers exiting that station on the previous five weekends was 6,557.
In other words, the protest brought 9,522 more people to SFO via BART than during a typical weekend. That’s 2.5 times the average weekend ridership.
The protest grew throughout the weekend. Sunday, January 29, set the record as the busiest Sunday in the 14-year history of the SFO station.
Approximately 3,500 more people arrived on Sunday than on Saturday. Typically, Sunday is the slowest day of the week at the SFO station, but trains on January 29 were 3.3 times more crowded than on usual Sundays.
With 9,770 passenger exits, Sunday would have been the fifth busiest day at the SFO station in 2015, the last full year where data is available. For comparison, the busiest single day since 2011 at the SFO BART station was on November 27, 2013 (the day before Thanksgiving), when 13,062 passenger exits were recorded.
Protesters came and went throughout the weekend, so we can’t be sure how big the protest was at its peak. But with more protesters arriving by car, it’s clear that over 10,000 people attended the SFO protest at some point during the weekend.
