Originally Posted by
Eastbay1K
They could have, and there's plenty of money to be made here, but no one wants to devote the resources. So we have a de facto monopoly forming @ OAK. You can't operate the shorter hops at minimal frequency and expect your business travelers to stick around.
It isn't that I don't like SFO (save the delays) and without traffic, it is about 10 minutes more travel time than SFO. 10 and 20 and 30 years ago, I had to plan for traffic. What we have now isn't traffic anymore. It is life-ruining eternal congestion. Coming home in the afternoon (including Saturdays) - 2+ hour drive home. 25 miles. No joke. BART? Up to 20 minute wait for a train (then have to change trains) and it is an hour plus on the train and then an UBER/LYFT from the station.
This causes business people to fly OAK even if their preferred airlines don't service the airport.
I don’t disagree, but of those airlines (AS, BA, DL and WN) only one of them faces stronger competition (in terms of a bigger airline) in every single one of their hubs with a metro population > 3 million.
Let’s look at what their effectively uncontested hubs are (in that they are top dog and there isn’t a bigger airline fighting for it):
DL has ATL, SLC, MSP, DTW.
UA has IAH, EWR, SFO, IAD.
BA has LHR.
WN has MDW, HOU, DAL, OAK, SJC, BAL, SAN*
AS has ANC and PDX.
* yes, I know, WN doesn’t have hubs. They sure are top dog in those airports though.
Go look at those metro populations and tell me who’s got the better position.
”Let’s start a land war in Asia, I mean Oakland, while all but two of our hubs/focus cities are all under attack by a bigger airline (and those are the smallest ones by population, and one is useless for connecting anyone outside the state of Alaska) during a merger” might not be the best strategy. To be honest, AS is arguably MORE aggressive against WN than they have been in the past: they’ve pushed BAL, SJC, SAN. They restarted SJC-AUS after folding it when WN entered. They haven’t completely folded DAL yet (and TBH maybe they should and move everything to DFW, they could pick up some AA connecting traffic that way). I find it hard to give them grief that they pick and choose battles against bigger airlines. But I don’t live in the East Bay. Maybe I’d feel differently if I did.