Free Weekend BART Tickets

[!NOTE] This was a summer 2022 promotion. BART occasionally runs similar deals—check their website for current offers.

BART ran a free weekend ticket promotion this summer. Sign up on their website ahead of time and you get a free round trip, no fare gates to worry about on either end. It’s a low-effort way to explore parts of the Bay Area that are technically a short train ride away but easy to never actually visit.

Oakland, Berkeley, and Fremont all fall into that category for a lot of San Francisco residents — close enough to reach in twenty or thirty minutes, far enough that people rarely make the trip without a reason. A free ticket is a decent enough reason.

BART connects directly into Muni in the city, so getting to a station from most SF neighborhoods isn’t a hassle. The Central Subway opened in late 2022, adding Chinatown and Union Square stops to the rail network and making the connection even easier from those areas.

If you use a free ticket for a day trip: Oakland’s Chinatown has some of the best dim sum in the Bay Area without the wait times you’d hit in SF. Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue has a solid food scene near the downtown BART stop. And Millbrae connects directly to Caltrain if you want to keep going south toward the Peninsula.