Bay Area Rapid Transit is a transport system of San Francisco, which serves 6 routes and has about 100 million passengers per year. The system was launched in 1972 is being extended yearly.
San Francisco has two types of “subways”: BART and MUNI. Muni is the internal municipal transit system exclusively for San Francisco, while Bay Area Rapid Transit serves not only San Francisco, but also the surrounding neighborhoods and Bay Area cities. BART looks like the most ordinary subway with underground and surface sections of the road.
Bay Area Rapid Transit was opened on September 11, 1972, and today consists of 5 lines with a total length of 167 km and 44 stations.
What is BART?
BART is an abbreviation, standing for Bay Area Rapid Transit, where rapid transit is a train, and The Bay Area refers to the area that encompasses San Francisco and surrounding cities, including several major nearby cities such as Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and many others.
The very first logo for the Bay Area Rapid Transit service was introduced in 1958 and featured a sharp geometric composition in a green and black color palette with white and gray elements. The badge was composed of a stylized rocket, formed by two equal parts in khaki-green and black, overlapped by a solid gray ring with bold uppercase lettering in a modern sans/serif font. The two white capitals, “RT”, were set one above another inside the ring.
The initial logo for Bay Area Rapid Transit was introduced in 1967 and featured a modern badge in a blue color palette with the “Barto” in the uppercase written in three-dimensional light gray letters above the stylized enlarged “BA” monogram in the lowercase. The monogram had its thick massive letters in dark and light shades of blue overlapping each other.
The text-based Bay Area Rapid Transit is laconic and modern. Composed of two monograms in different styles, the logo features a beautiful and strong black and blue color palette with a white background.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit wordmark is split into two parts — the lowercase “BA” monogram is the central element of the system’s visual identity.
Executed in a bold sans-serif typeface, the two overlapping letters feature identical shapes but different colors. The “B” is black and the “A” is blue, which represents the reliability and authority of the brand.
The “BART” abbreviation written in all the capital letters is placed above the monogram and colored black. The traditional sans-serif typeface of the inscription is perfectly balanced and spaced, creating a fresh and crispy look of the logo.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit logo is contemporary and stylish and looks good on any placement due to the simplicity of its shapes and intensity of its colors.
Both the lowercase monogram and the uppercase abbreviation on the official logo of the Bay Area Rapid Transit are set in one font — a modern geometric sans-serif, which is very similar to Helvetica Now Text Black, or M Ying Hei HK W9. But due to the position of the letters (very far from each other) it looks more interesting.
As for the color palette of the Bay Area Rapid Transit visual identity, it is based on a combination of black and sky blue, where black symbolized stability, professionalism, and expertise, and blue is a representation of safety, reliability, and trustworthiness.