The Empire State Building took one year and 45 days from the start of construction to its opening. We used to build things in this country. Now we pride ourselves on not building things.
In Washington, D.C. Amtrak’s Union Station is undergoing a $9 billion renovation, that will probably cost more. It’s not even projected to be complete until the 2040s. California high speed rail is a 20-year, $100 billion boondoggle that will probably never be built as-intended.
Oakland’s airport took a mere five months to build. Now adding 16 gates could take decades, if it’s ever able to happen.
- Land for the airport was acquired in April 1927
- Its 7,020 foot runway, then the largest in the world, was built in 21 days
- And the airport was dedicated in September – a mere five months after the land was acquired.
There are just too many veto points for building along the way, most of them created by the well-meaning National Environmental Policy Act.
Environmental review created too much ‘citizen participation’. Large-scale projects drag on for years and cost far more than their counterparts in Europe. Federal agencies signing off on projects add too many costs, too.
You have Environmental Impact Statements, Public Review and Comment Periods (followed by supplemental Environmental Impact Statements), and then Legal Challenges.
An insufficient National Environmental Policy Act analysis alone is reason for courts to start the process over. And multiple agencies must coordinate and work through disagreements and communication issues. And California rules go even further.
A planned expansion of the Oakland airport lays all of this bare. The Vice Mayor of the City of Alameda opposes any expansion. He doesn’t have environmental concerns as such. Instead he announced plans to use the process of environmental laws to stop the project.
Alameda Vice Mayor Tony Daysog raised an alarm about the expansion at a city council meeting, saying, “This expansion represents a profound negative impact on the quality of life of all of Alameda. It is imperative that we leverage the (environmental review) process to get Oakland Airport to scale down from its proposal.”
Alameda put together a list of objections because “the Port of Oakland will be required to respond to each of its questions or face a potential lawsuit” and he’s already threatening to sue. Their critique goes on for 110 pages.
The Port of Oakland is trying to build a new terminal with 16 gates and improve their current dilapidated facilities. They’re also considering changing the name of the airport because nobody knows where Oakland is, though they used to have British Airways service which the U.K. airline promoted with a rap battle.
Today Southwest Airlines controls the vast majority of traffic at the airport that was dedicated by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and was the site of Amelia Earhart’s final trip departure. It hasn’t seen investment in fifteen years. And locals are going to use all of the levers of process to make sure it doesn’t see any, any time soon.
Adding a direct shuttle link to BART around 2014 was certainly an investment, no?
East Bay is an entirely different place than when OAK was built. Millions of residents vs mostly farmland back then. Shouldn’t compare the two eras.
Its not NEPA in California. The far stricter CEQA is too blame. Listen on Spotify to Episode 4 of the Econ 102 podcast as Bay Area economist Noah Smith explains how messed up California Land Use policy really is. The direct and primary cause of the California housing shortage and resulting high home and rent prices and too some degree increasing homelessness is the use of the CEQA process by each NIMBY group to intentionally kill land use projects.
@TLU not in airport capacity, no
SF Bay Area native / recent Oakland resident here (lived on Piedmont Ave, beautiful street & neighborhood).
OAK is more of a cargo port than anything. The city of Oakland is geographically large, and the airport isn’t particularly central. From many residential districts in the Bay Area (even East Bay) SFO or even SJC are just as convenient with much better commercial passenger amenities. OAK doesn’t even have particularly short security lines (and at times they can be staggeringly long).
Frankly the Bay Area is not that dense in terms of population and SFO and SJC together should serve passenger traffic in the region just fine. Leave OAK for cargo operations which don’t need more passenger gates.
I can personally attest to how difficult environmental laws in Cali make to build things. It’s no joke. There’s only so long we can live off the Eisenhower era investments, and that time is coming soon.
@HVC if I have a choice of flying into the Bay Area, OAK is by far the best choice. No fog.
I can personally attest to how difficult environmental laws in Cali make it to build things. It’s no joke. There’s only so long we can live off the Eisenhower era investments, and that time is coming soon.
@HVC if I have a choice of flying into the Bay Area, OAK is by far the best choice. No fog.
So, snobbish UA 1k residents of Nob Hill and other San Francisco neighborhoods yet will be encountering SouthWest tik-tok type felllow passengers at SFO while Oakland won’t expand to accept them all? O dear!
I admit that I have no family or friends who every went to Oakland, I never have been to Oakland and am not sure how to get there except that I think it’s somewhere further than Emeryville, I assume BA went there to serve the SV (Silicon Valley) but maybe BA execs didn’t know exactly where Oakland was, either, and I didn’t know BA was markieted with rap entertainment. Funny
The situation is probably all about money. Expansion means Alameda gets more traffic but Oakland gets the lion’s share of benefits.
Heh. Yeah, welcome to California– filled with “Cities of The Future”, since pretty much any improvement is ALWAYS permanently in the future.
There was a billion earmarked in Obama’s “Shovel Ready Jobs” $800B “stimulus” program in 2009 to fix the screwed up runways at SFO. 15 years later? Nothing. Same mess.
I have 6 miles of “add a freeway lane” to the 101 near my house. They started it when my son was in Junior High. He’s now three years PAST his five-year college and professional school. It ain’t done yet.
The CA system is structured to throttle every project as many ways as the locals can manage.
It’s truly insane.
Alameda county is probably the worst place in California. The entire system is backward looking. The place defines maximizing costs through unnecessary regulation. Oakland airport is terrific in its maximum basicness, particularly for meetings in the SF Financial District from destinations served by SWA, particularly from places like BUR. You can just BART in and it’s easy/convenient. Perhaps wildly unsafe now but in theory it works. This is a funny article because I have a colleague from MI that I periodically meet in Oakland for near-by client meetings and she says when she flies into OAK that she is “flying to California.”
All I know is that years ago OAK-SFO was the ideal UA mileage run. They had a 727 that repositioned on the 7 mile flight across the Bay. At year end it was not uncommon to find the planes full with everyone flying across to get their then minimum 750 miles (occasionally it would be bonus eligible). The smart travelers would not wait until year end when the prices were bid up. Instead, they’d get the normal $19 fare. The year-end congestion at SFO curbside was amusing too. Everyone’s friends or family would race across the Bay or San Mateo Bridge to pick up the mileage-runners. When the planes were full almost every seat had a car waiting for them. Cars were 3 deep at terminal.
Both the arrival and departure paths for airlines (Southwest, Alaska, etc.) are completely over the water, and the aircraft used are much cleaner burning, more fuel efficient, and substantially quieter than 10 years ago. Environmental concerns don’t seem to be anything more than the usual construction NIMBYism…
It will be sad to watch Oakland lose jobs and visitors in an immature and impractical effort to single-handedly stop climate change. Anyone who seriously cares about this issue should know that the only result of stopping OAK modernization will result in SFO and SJC taking dollars that could help support Oakland’s precarious economy, and result in more overall emissions as jets get backed up on taxiways while waiting in line at already traffic-saturated SFO.
@PDT Great story
As someone who gets air traffic daily flying out of OAK, I say thank the Lord California, Alameda County, and Oakland have struct laws. I have no desire to have the multiple planes that fly over turn into nonstop planes. I doubt those who live closer to the airport than I do would want it either. This article looks like a lot of gripping over something that probably has no personal effect on the author. Lots of crocodile tears about how bad it is to take care of the planet.
“@HVC if I have a choice of flying into the Bay Area, OAK is by far the best choice. No fog.”
A thousand times this. Also because there are fewer flights and the runways aren’t too close together like SFO, when there _is_ weather there are still no delays. By BART it is equal travel time to downtown SF and closer to anywhere east (eg Berkeley).
@HVC You must be crazy. OAK is by far the easiest airport in the Bay Area, and the most reliable since there is no weather issues like SFO.
@ Gary, OAK is an older airport but it isn’t dilapidated. They’ve redone the terminals interior and upgraded the food options to be mostly local restaurants, far better than being stuck with only “Chili’s to-go” that you find at many airports of similar size. Alameda is NIMBY central and their residents are going to fight this tooth and nail, but hopefully it gets pushed through. This would add 16 additional gates and bring a ton of extra capacity to the Bay Area. Sky Team should consider making it a focus city, they could give UA some actual competition!
Anyone who lived in the Bay Area witnessed the ruins of the unbridled overdevelopment.
There used to be oysters and fish in the Bay, and the water was crystal clear. Construction like the original OAK eliminated acres of filtering swampland and toilets discharged straight into the Bay.
If they had decent regulations back then, like Singapore, things would not be so crazy. And just exactly why does the Bay Area need three SUBSIDIZED airports, other than to benefit the suburbanites to the East, even thought they are already served by Sacramento airport? You bet that If OAK was private, they wouldn’t be talking about expansion, but hey taxpayer money is free.