Originally Posted by
ucdtim17
Airlines (aside from WN) still prefer to tolerate the delays and all the added costs that entails to actually moving any significant business to OAK/SJC. Some large percentage of the flying public isn't fully informed on Bay Area geography/airports and/or just wants to fly to an airport with "San Francisco" in its name, so until that changes, or there is some other authority that forces some rebalancing of traffic, this is what we're going to get.
Originally was just talking about OAK, but threw SJC in there without rewriting. WN applies to both, but SJC has been more successful than OAK recently with other airlines. It's further away from SFO so less of a direct competitor. The flip side of that is it has a smaller population base to draw from than SFO/OAK but the distance from SFO + close proximity to lots of big tech companies has fueled growth there. It's possible to imagine a counterfactual where the northward movement of the tech boom this cycle benefits OAK more relative to SJC but that hasn't been the case. Maybe next time.