It handles around 100,000 passengers daily (175,000 on weekdays), and thus carries the majority of the agglomeration's regional public transport traffic.

The normal rolling stock rosters for the Bern S-Bahn are: As early as 1974, Vereinigte Bern–Worb-Bahnen [de] (VBW), forerunner of Regionalverkehr Bern-Solothurn (RBS), began operating S-Bahn-style clock-face schedule services in the Bern area.

[11] The next step came in 1987, when Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) began running trains from Thun through Bern to Laupen BE or Fribourg/Freiburg on a half-hourly schedule.

The three RBS lines were formally incorporated into the network, SBB transferred the operation of the S1 and S3 to the Bern-Lötschberg-Simplon-Bahn (BLS).

Service on the Ramsei–Huttwil line [de] was cut back from Affoltern-Weier to Sumiswald-Grünen, and the S4 and S44 swapped termini, with the S4 now going to Sumiswald-Grünen and the S44 going to Langnau i.E.[19] The December 2011 addition of the S31 between Münchenbuchsee and Belp (via Bern) increased the service frequency between those two stations to every fifteen minutes.