BART Loud Enough To Cause Hearing Loss

It’s plain fact: the sky is blue, water’s wet, and BART is loud as hell. If you’re new to the Bay Area, that violent screeching feels less inaugural and more like a ritual hazing. What if nobody warned you about it first? Imagine looking around, panicked, wondering why the hell everyone else looks so calm. It’s because everybody knows the rules but you. To enter San Francisco, you must face the underwater banshee. She haunts the Transbay Tube, and her scream is dangerously loud. So loud in fact that regular commuters through the Tube risk permanent hearing loss. 

Longtime Bay Area residents remember BART’s OG trains with mixed feelings (Those seats were comfy—if you scored a clean one). Love ‘em or hate ‘em, one thing we all agreed on is those cars were hella loud. One of BART’s greatest promises and justifications for the updated fleet, initially projected to cost $2.584 billion, was a smoother, quieter ride. BART maintained these new trains reportedly ran quieter by up to 20 decibels. Among other improvements, it seemed this new fleet would solve an appreciable handful of problems, decibel overkill high among them. 

BART notoriously squeaks and scrapes beneath the Berkeley Hills, downtown Oakland, and the Mission and Financial Districts of San Francisco. But nowhere is it louder than in the Transbay Tube. Noise levels in the Tube regularly breach that of pneumatic jackhammers. The volume is violent. Articles about these harsh noise levels have appeared regularly in Bay Area media. This one via KQED from nearly a decade ago highlights the same concerns addressed in last week’s Chronicle piece. The SF Chronicle routinely publishes articles about BART (BARTicles?) and has complained before of the noisy train ride. 

Fifteen years after the SF Chronicle’s last systemwide survey, results are largely unchanged. For reference, a normal office or classroom conversation tops out at 65 decibels. BART trains hit 85 or higher under the Berkeley Hills and downtown Oakland and San Francisco. 85 decibels is the equivalent of someone shouting in your ear, also the threshold for hearing loss. Two years after the last legacy car took its farewell trip, is the new fleet any quieter than its predecessor? 

Taking BART lately can be an unpredictable, infuriating experience. Electrical fires, unsanitary or unsafe conditions, fare hikes, cancelled service that strands riders on the wrong side of the Bay. Ask anyone that takes BART even semi-frequently and you’ll get horror stories, some humorous, many bleak. About the only dependable feature of BART anymore is the noisy ride.  

In 2010, eight years before BART’s “fleet of the future” hit the tracks, the Chronicle recorded 100 decibels (dB) in the Transbay Tube. That’s on par with a car horn blaring, a jackhammer firing, or starting a motorcycle. It is six times louder than a lively conversation with your most extroverted friend. Meanwhile, noise levels in the Transbay Tube aren’t only the same, they’re actually a little worse. In 2026, two years after the fleet’s complete rollout, the Chronicle returned and recorded a peak volume of 105.1 dB. 

Sure the sound is annoying, and at length, somewhat painful—but is it dangerous? Short answer: yes. The brief duration of dangerously high decibels gets passed off as harmless the same way an x-ray is harmless. One chest x-ray delivers 0.1 millisieverts of radiation, about ten days’ worth of ordinary background radiation at sea level. It is too insignificant a dose for consequences, but radiation exposure is cumulative. While you may go years between films, x-ray technicians work with radiation daily. It’s why they wear lead shielding. Like the effects of radiation, hearing loss is cumulative. Similar terms like dose and exposure apply, dangerous past a certain threshold. “At 100 decibels, the recommended exposure limit is fifteen minutes. BART riders are only exposed to those noise levels only intermittently, and usually for brief periods.” (SF Chronicle, 2010) And yet the Chronicle failed to account for the kind of rider under discussion. Sporadic riders are not exposed to dangerously high volumes as often as regular commuters. Chronic exposure erodes hearing irrevocably. 

Five minutes of a hundred decibels, twice daily, and you start risking hearing loss within a week. After six weeks, or eight hours at 100 dB, serious hearing damage is likely. If you regularly take BART, take a good pair of headphones or earbuds with you. The sooner you intervene, the better chance you have of preserving your hearing, and your cognition.