Celebrating BART at 50: A Critical Link for San Francisco By Jeremy Menzies This month, our sister agency BART, celebrates its 50th anniversary . BART service changed transportation in the Bay Area forever, connecting communities in a way that hadn’t been done before. For San Francisco, the construction of BART not only provided new travel options within the city and to the East Bay but also built the Muni Metro system. Here’s a look at some of BART’s history through the SFMTA’s historic photos. This conceptual drawing from around 1960 shows the combined BART and Muni Metro subway underneath Market Street at Powell. The story of BART goes back decades before the opening in September 1972. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that a plan and funding were in place for BART to come to fruition. Originally, five counties formed the Bay Area Rapid Transit District. In a 1960 engineering report , proposed route maps showed lines extending both north across the Golden Gate into Marin and s...