The Second Coming

Guy Span, S.D.

Your intrepid reporter was on the ferry, basking in the warmth of the setting sun, enjoying the glow of an adult beverage, when his solitude was abruptly interrupted.

“Hello, Guy.”

“Oh hello, Ken,” your reporter said softly, certain that the solace of his undisturbed Bay view was all but shattered.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that plan to build new airport runways for SFO out in the Bay…” <Well, nobody else was…> “and I think it’s a bad idea. You see…” <and once Ken gets launched, you just have to kick in all digits to try and follow along> “basically, SFO is a bad airport–that is, it’s in the wrong place. Many flights are cancelled due to fog and weather conditions. Why, once I was at SFO and my United flight to Miami was due in from Hawaii but it couldn’t land so it was diverted to Oakland, where it rested for a few hours until the fog lifted. Then, for a brief shining moment, the United monitor reported that my flight was arriving into SFO from Oakland. I should have taken a picture.”

Your reporter chuckled in sympathy, “Well, a few fog problems doesn’t make the premiere airport in the Bay Area a bad airport, now does it?”

“Well, tell me how building more runways into the Bay is going to solve the fog problem?” he asked.

“Ah, well, perhaps less water area will…”

“Nonsense,” said Ken.

Trying again, “Perhaps with more runways spread further apart, the planes can take off and land even in zero visibility.”

“Take off,” he admitted, “but landing would still be difficult. No, the solution is not building more runways in the foggy Bay, but to better utilize the runways that are already in place.”

“And what runways would that be?” your reporter inquired suddenly struck by the thought that for no apparent reason this was the wrong question.

“Why the ones not affected by the fog over in Oakland, where my plane landed. You see, there is capacity over in Oakland and much better weather patterns. If the two airports were operated as one, there would be far fewer flight delays.”

“Yes, and how will passengers and baggage get from Oakland back to SFO where perhaps the connection is? You know it can take over an hour to drive there?”

“That’s easy,” said Ken. “We build the famed “Second Crossing,” which connects SFO to Oakland, and we can even connect it to the SFO BART station and perhaps get some use for that nearly wasted $1.5 billion extension.”

Your reporter actually snorted, “The Second Coming will come before the Second Crossing.”
“Well, let’s think about that,” he said mildly. “The problem here is to think regionally not locally. SFO wants to spend billions building a bigger airport because that’s all airport people can think about–how to make the empire a little bigger. BART wants a Second Crossing because the first one is full and more BART is all they know. Oakland wants a rail connection to BART because they feel left out. All of these capital projects together will cost billions; you can count on that. Individually, they might have some relative utility value. But put together they have no synergy. You see where I’m going?”
Your clueless reporter stared into the depths of his beverage looking for inspiration and found only moral support. “You want to connect BART from the Oakland Coliseum to the Oakland Airport to SFO as the Second Crossing? That’s nuts. BART is way too slow and what about all that baggage? And it still doesn’t solve the runway problem.”

“Ah,” he said with a smile of satisfaction, “that’s only if you use BART. What if you built a separate, very high-speed train of 175 mph to operate between the three stations? Then you would connect all the dots, except for the Balkanization factor...”

“The what factor? And that does NOT connect the dots. Ridiculous! I read somewhere that for every modal change, some 20 percent of the potential riders are lost. And you are proposing two of them. So it doesn’t solve all the problems.”

“The modal change issue is a red herring. Passengers dislike modal change because it costs time and creates inconvenience. However, if you can shoot them from Oakland to the Peninsula in five to eight minutes, saving them time, they will then put up with the inconvenience. And it does solve the problems. Instead of spending billions building runways in the Bay, we build a very high-speed tunnel train and use the two airports as one. Baggage compartments can admit loaded baggage carts complete with the airline containers. Passengers could arrive at either airport, check their bags, and go fairly quickly to the gate at either airport. In this manner, fog would not disrupt operations at SFO. Also, SFO saves building environmentally unfriendly runways in the Bay, Oakland no longer needs to build a transit connection, and the Second Crossing gets built as a bonus.”

Your reporter was only slightly impressed. “That’s an interesting idea, but it will never fly. You are talking about three different agencies, each, as you pointed out, with their own empires to guard. Cooperation between two competing airports will never happen. BART would insist on its slow trains. Heck, there are 23 different transit agencies in the Bay Area alone. No one even knows how many other agencies, commissions, transit advisory groups, mayoral transit task forces, airport commissions, and local airport advisories that would all have to have some say in such a plan. The sheer size of the input and competing agendas are enough to make my prediction about the Second Coming correct.”