Bay CrossingsInterview

Steven Grossman 

Director of Aviation, Port of Oakland

What’s it like running an airport?

It’s a lot like running a small city. We provide transportation and parking. There are also police, fire and medical services at the airport. In many respects, we cover the same ground as a city government. But we have the added complication of running a business because we receive no money from the city or general taxpayer funds. We’re like a private sector business in that we have to make money to pay our bills. On top of that, we have a public service function of looking out for our passengers. Our customers must be treated right and their experience must be positive because in almost every case, it’s their first and last impression of the East Bay. And if all that wasn’t enough, we also respond to unexpected complications such as the events of September 11th. And that’s my world in a nutshell.

FedEx and other freight carriers are big customers of yours, operating large sorting facilities at Oakland International. A cargo ferry connecting your airport to the Peninsula would get a whole lot of trucks off the road. You’ve been studying the concept for a while. What’s the holdup?

We have been studying it for a while and we think it works but the cargo companies have to support it and be willing to commit to it. As of right now, there’s no one out there who will subsidize this. What the studies have shown is that if you’re going to run a passenger service it’s going to have to be subsidized and government is used to doing that. Whether it’s buses or rails, all of that is subsidized by the government in one form or another. No one wants to subsidize the cargo side of it, even though our studies show it would do a lot of good for lessening congestion. So right now there are discussions under way with the two largest carriers – FedEx and UPS – as well as several ferry operators as to the economics of this thing. What’s being looked at is what it costs to purchase and maintain a ferry or two that could serve air cargo, what would the cost be to the air cargo carriers. My guess is, if it’s going to happen, it’ll be within the next two to three years.

What about passenger ferry service to airports? Do heightened security requirements make it impracticable?

I don’t think heightened security makes it impracticable at all. Whatever ferry service we receive would have to come in on the non-secure side of the airport so it wouldn’t really be a problem. Again, it’s going to be economics and the volume of traffic that decides. I know the WTA is looking at it. One of the many ferry terminals that they’ve looked at would be here at the Oakland Airport, or we could use the terminal that’s already in Alameda on Harbor Parkway and just run a shuttle bus. We’re hoping that it comes about because it would be a nice way to get to the airport. But it really takes a rather sizeable ferry network to make it all happen. Just having it as an add-on to the current ferry might not generate the volume you’d need to make it worthwhile. But as the Bay Area ferry system develops, I think we’re going to be a likely location for some kind of ferry terminal.

Southwest has a major presence at Oakland International so people know it’s a good place to catch a flight to LA. But tell us about some of the international flights one might take out of Oakland International.

Over the last few years, we’ve had tremendous growth in our long haul service, international and domestic. We’ve added service to Europe but right now, most of our international service is to Mexico. We have service to many of the inland destinations in Mexico and some of the beach resorts. We have had seasonal service to Paris and Tahiti and it’ll probably come back next Summer. On the domestic side, we’ve added non-stop flights to Honolulu, Maui and Kona, Atlanta, and New York, both to JFK and Newark. We’re starting to see a lot of long haul activity out of Oakland and there’s no reason anymore why someone should have to drive across the bridge to that other airport to take a long distance flight.

Why not manage Oakland and SFO cooperatively like in New York, where international flights go out of JFK and short-haul flights use LaGuardia? Wouldn’t the region be better off?

Your question reflects a bit of a misunderstanding. These days, with airline deregulation, you can’t manage your airports like that. Not even New York does that. There’s plenty of short haul activity into JFK, even though it’s thought of as a predominately international airport. And La Guardia would handle international flights except that it is way too congested to handle the jets that would be necessary. We cannot tell the airlines where to fly. No civil authority can tell United Airlines, “You’re going to take these flights and fly them out of Oakland and these other flights, fly them out of San Francisco.” It can’t be done under today’s current regulatory environment. Should that change it may make a lot of sense. But if you do that, then you’ve got to figure out a way to get people very quickly from one airport to another. I just don’t see that happening. Everything I’ve seen from Congress shows they’re not going to change the deregulated environment we live in. In most respects, SFO is like JFK. It’s the dominant international airport for this region. That’s where 95% of the people ought to be going to catch international non-stop flights if that’s what they want to do. Oakland Airport has a major role in serving the needs of the people in the East Bay with short-haul and long-haul service. We’re starting to see much more of that. The more of that we get, the fewer trips that are made across the Bay. We’re starting to serve a much more important role in the Bay Area as we expand out from just being a North-South airport.

The Port of Oakland empire includes a seaport and major railhead in addition to the airport. Does it make sense to look at improved rail connections to places like Los Angeles and Seattle?

There’s clearly a lot of that going on. Within California, a high-speed rail authority has been formed. But consider that you’re looking at a project that costs in the neighborhood of $25 billion to implement and would take many years. High speed rail probably does have a role to play in the long term transportation needs of the state but I don’t think it will ever replace air travel because even on high-speed rail, you’re talking about 3-5 hours to make that trip. In other words, you wouldn’t be able to make that trip back and forth in one day or at least not very easily. And I think we’re going to see improvements in air transportation as it relates to the time it takes, particularly on the airport end concerning security and baggage. We’re seeing the worst of it today. I think things will get better. We’ll get back to or closer to the pre-9/11 timeframe that we had to deal with. We’re many years away from those rail connections.

Oakland International handles a lot of cargo. What kinds of things move in and out of your airport?

We’re a West Coast cargo hub for Fed Ex. They serve the nine western states out of Oakland. We’re also their pacific gateway. Their flight from Osaka comes into Oakland. What’s interesting is that you can send a package from Japan and have it arrive at its destination in the U.S. the day before you sent it. UPS also has a major operation here. Those carriers deal with the smaller packages, generally items under 100 lbs. We deal with a lot of US Mail. They provide a tremendous number of jobs for this area. Of the 10,500 jobs we have here at the airport, between four and five thousand of them are in air cargo. It’s one of the major reasons we’re in the air cargo business.

You’re about to get a better connection between the Coliseum BART station and the airport. What’s up with that?

It’s been on the drawing board for twenty some odd years. We call it Air BART. We’ve been running that service via shuttle buses for about twenty years now and handling about 600,000 passengers per year. So it’s a pretty large system as far as the number of people we handle. What we’re looking at, and it’s essentially a funded project now, is some type of a light rail or monorail type of system that will connect us to the BART station. We expect to handle about a million passengers a year moving up to three to five million over the next twenty years on an annual basis. It’ll be a part of the BART system. It’ll really be a very, very convenient way to get to the airport from anywhere BART serves. It’ll take you right into the terminal complex. And from an environmental standpoint, it will take something like 50 million miles off the roads once it’s fully developed. It will have a positive and strong environmental aspect by taking cars off the road and improving air quality.

The current schedule calls for BART to award the contract for the connector in 2003. Then it takes three or four years to build it. It should be operational by 2005 or so.