By August 1965, the city of Oakland wanted to call the station "MacArthur", while BART preferred "Oakland North". A BART committee selected "MacArthur" in October 1965, rejecting a proposal for "Temescal". The BART Board approved the name in December 1965. MacArthur station opened on September 11, 1972, as the northern terminus of the inaugural BART line (now the Orange Line) which ran to . Service was extended north to on January 29, 1973. A second line between MacArthur and (now the Yellow Line) opened on May 21, 1973; it was extended to San Francisco on September 16, 1974, when the
Transbay Tube opened.
Richmond–Daly City service via MacArthur (now the Red Line) began on April 19, 1976. The station included several pieces of public art: an abstract mural by
Mark Adams over a staircase (which Adams later replaced with two murals after the stairs were removed for an elevator in 2000), and tile mosaics by Adams and Alfonso Pardiñas in the fare lobby. On July 22, 2018,
a man stabbed three women at the station, killing one of them. Sunday-only service to the station on the
Dublin/Pleasanton line was operated from February 11, 2019 to February 10, 2020. BART and the City of Oakland began planning in 1993 for
transit-oriented development (TOD) to replace the surface parking lot east of the station. Construction of a 450-space BART parking garage at the southern end of the site began in mid-2011; it opened on September 15, 2014. A 90-unit residential building was constructed in 2013–2016, followed by a 385-unit residential complex with of retail space constructed in 2015–2020. The latter project included a reconstruction of the plaza outside the station: planters were removed, a new concrete surface added, and a 200-space bike station was built. The work took place from June 2018 to August 2019. The final phase of TOD – a 24-story, 403-unit residential tower with of retail space – was completed in early 2021. , BART does not anticipate development on a smaller agency-owned parcel on the west side of SR 24 until the 2030s. == Station layout ==