OAK is great -- if you live in the east bay. Of course, someone I know says that it takes about the same amount of time to get to as it does to go to SMF. And if you want to fly WN to San Francisco, you don't have much choice. Let's keep in mind the distances here: from SF to San Jose is over 46 miles, and at least an hour-and-a-half by road, one way, most times of the day. From SF to Oakland Airport is about 18 miles, and between 30 and 45 minutes drive time, depending on if there is a game at the Coliseum. --On Friday, May 23, 2003 9.44 -0400 Nick Laflamme <dplaflamme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > San Francisco is in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't," situation. > There's nowhere to put a new airport, and the international terminal is > still quite new, so they wouldn't want to abandon it, but their runway > configuration is notoriously bad. SJC is heavily constrained by the town > around it, and I don't think much of OAK, either. (OK, it's been years > since I've been to OAK.) I'm not sure that it does. The Bay Area is either a destination or just a place to get to the Pacific. As long as you're just an end-point, having a number of smaller airports doesn't seem to be much of a problem. The weather delays seem to affect airline operations more often than they strand passengers. And when you strand passengers, the hotels get more business! :-) One of the early suggestions was to forget the runway expansion at SFO and instead put in a high-speed link between SFO and OAK (was to be either hovercraft or hydrofoil, I forget). If that had been workable, the problem is that SFO and OAK are run by different agencies who were simply never going to cooperate. The best solution I ever heard to that was that SF and Oakland would agree to a swap -- Oakland gets all of San Francisco's port operations (and gets to shutdown SF's idiotic non-rail intermodal terminal) including the passenger boats, and SF gets the Oakland Airport. Put in a high-speed link, and you could move all of the *[Connection,Eagle,Express] traffic to the runways at Oakland, and still keep Southwest as a "San Francisco" destination. > The SF Bay Area needs one good airport, not three > mediocre ones, but that's not going to happen. For good reason -- it would also be another bad airport, and the local residents of Sunnyvale and Mountain View would never stand for it. There was some talk of making it a GA field when the base was being decommissioned, and that went *nowhere* fast. The few remaining suitable spots are too far north or east, and I don't see that anyone local thinks it's that important. > No one talks about using Moffett Field, so I assume it's not adequate for > commercial traffic, even if they build the infrastructure around it. There > aren't many other sites for airfields around the Bay. -- | Kenton A. Hoover / Private Citizen / shibumi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx |