Maps compare BART’s footprint to other major transit systems around the world

BART vs. PARIS METRO Stations serviced: 48 (BART) vs. 302 (Paris Métro) Miles of track: 121 (BART) vs. 133 (Paris Métro) Annual ridership: 125 million (BART) vs. 1.5 billion (Paris Métro) BART vs. PARIS METRO Stations serviced: 48 (BART) vs. 302 (Paris Métro) Miles of track: 121 (BART) vs. 133 (Paris Métro) Annual ridership: 125 million (BART) vs. 1.5 billion (Paris Métro) Photo: Blair Heagerty/SFGATE Buy photo Photo: Blair Heagerty/SFGATE Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close Maps compare BART’s footprint to other major transit systems around the world 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

Yes, BART is crowded. And sometimes pretty gross. And almost always very bad at dealing with fare evaders.

But for all of its issues, it still manages to move a surprising number of people. In 2018, BART's annual ridership was 125 million. While a system that moves 142 times the population of San Francisco across 112 miles of tracks sounds pretty sizable for a major metro subway system, is it actually?

To find out, we took transit maps from 10 big-time transit systems around the world and overlaid them on the BART map (see: the handy slideshow above) to show not only the difference in size, but in overall coverage breadth. Example: While the Chicago "L" covers about the same distance as BART (103 miles), it has three times as many stations (145 vs. 48).

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Is it a perfect comparison? Definitely not — no two transit systems or large metro areas are the same. In the greater Bay Area alone, there are 25 connecting transit agencies. But in an effort to try to get close to an apples-to-apples comparison, we tried to 1) only include the most widely used transit system for each major metro, and 2) keep this to a subway-to-subway comparison — meaning no high-speed rails.

So how does BART stack up? (*turns attention dramatically to slideshow above*)

Grant Marek is SFGATE's editorial director. Email: grant.marek@sfgate.com | Twitter: @grant_marek