BART partners with Uber to offer discounted rides to, from some Bay Area stations

DALY CITY, Calif. (KGO) -- BART and Uber announced a partnership Tuesday to offer rides to and from some stations across the Bay Area.

It's an app integration that lets BART riders plan and pay for their Uber and BART trip within the BART app.

This is for all 50 stations, but for a limited time BART says riders coming to 10 stations will get a $5 discount up to six times over seven calendar days.

The stations include:

The program lets riders book short Uber trips to and from BART stations, for trips ranging between two and seven miles.

BART says this is to make public transit more accessible to the Bay Area.

Little Brothers - Friends of the Elderly, a local nonprofit that works to end isolation and loneliness among the elderly, said a partnership like this can have a huge impact.

"To ensure older adults can get to their doctor's appointment, pick up prescriptions, attend our social gatherings without having to choose between their health and their independence," said Cathy Michalec, the nonprofit's executive director.

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We spoke with BART riders before Tuesday's press conference that said the partnership is interesting but that they want to know that BART is investing in reliability following a series of service outages since last year.

We asked BART's CEO to address that.

"Bart's reliability right now we're going to be going to the board on our on-time performance," CEO Bob Powers said, "We're highest right now that we've been probably in the last 10 years. And so that doesn't excuse us from our service challenges that we've had in the past. And I think we've got our arms around that right now. We're taking an item to the board because no disruption, we got to eliminate those."

As for the discounted Uber rides to the 10 BART stations BART said UBER has $50,000 set aside to subsidize those rides.

BART expects the discounts to last through the end of the month.