As I noted in my trip report last week, I recently traveled to the Bay Area and flew into SFO but returned from Oakland. This wasn’t intentional, but because I knew they were both very close to the city, I felt confident in selecting the best flight times/prices from either airport. When we decided to go inside one and out of the other, I knew it was worth a comparison post. Let’s get it going.
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This has been a hot topic in the headlines recently. In the end, SFO exploded when Oakland chose to change its name to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport to better reflect its location. Lawsuits were being filed, and the situation appeared ridiculous. But none of this matters. Which option is most convenient?
In one corner is the heavyweight champion, San Francisco International Airport. SFO, which has around 500 daily flights, is home to the huge United Airlines hub that collects fog and is located about 7 miles south of the southern boundary of San Francisco.
The welterweight championship, which is being held at Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport—a small airport with a large name—is on the other corner. With roughly 140 flights each day, home to Southwest’s fleet of LUVjets, and entrance to the not-so-great Hegenberger Road portion of Oakland, OAK is about 7ish miles east of San Francisco, if swimming in the Bay is okay with you.
Of course, straight-line distance is completely useless, so I created this real-life test. I concluded that comparing airport security times with those at the Embarcadero station in San Francisco would be the most effective method.That is where we would board and exit BART to reach Fisherman’s Wharf.
I had intended to include travel to the hotel in the calculation, but because it was SF Pride, transit was massively disrupted throughout the city. That seems like an inaccurate measurement. So let’s see how each team performed.
At 1:52 p.m., we walked outside SFO security. That’s when the clock officially began.
We climbed the stairs to the AirTrain, which was ready and waiting for us.We were on the train by 1:55 p.m.
After going through Terminal 3 and the International Terminal, we disembarked from the AirTrain at the BART station. We had already loaded our Clipper cards onto our phones, so there was no delay in purchasing tickets anywhere along the route. There was a yellow train waiting, but it did not depart for some minutes. We were moving at 2:08 p.m.
After thirty-one minutes, at 2:39 p.m., we reached the Embarcadero station to discover that it was a lovely day for a walk along the waterfront.
Travel time from SFO security to Embarcadero was 47 minutes. Not too shabby.
On the way back, we arrived at the Embarcadero station and boarded the 9:57 am green train.
It was a brief trip to the Oakland Coliseum stop, where we arrived at 10:16 a.m. Here is where we committed a fatal error.
The BART line to the airport seemed to be well-timed to coincide with arriving trains, but we lingered as I took shots of an empty Coliseum. We approached the platform just as it was pulling away. That meant we had a 10-minute delay before the next one at 10:28 a.m. We had nothing but time, which wasn’t ideal for comparison.
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