Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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Generally speaking, SFO is a fantastic airport. It's 15 minutes from the city, is no where near as crowded as LAX, and has a good selection of flights from the big airlines, and many of the smaller ones. American (my preferred airline of choice has many flights there). There are two problems with SFO though.
Lets look at #1. The Skybridges are these things that connect the AirTrain to the terminals. There are 4 terminals at SFO. The old terminals, 1, 2 & 3 and the new international terminals. So to make it easy to get from the AirTrain to terminals 1, 2 & 3, SFO set out to build these bridges that bypass the necessity to go to the short term parking lot, take an elevator 5 floors down, cross some underground tunnel to the basement of the terminal and take escalators or stairs to check. The AirTrain goes right into the International terminals so they do not necessitate any AirTrain.
Now, Terminal 3 serves United and American Airlines. Terminal 2 is the old International terminal and is currently a ghost town. Terminal one is for everything else. Now get this. SFO build a Skybridge for Terminal 1 & 2, and they ran out of money to build one for 1. I would love to meet the person who decided to build a Skybridge for a Terminal that services NO passengers.
I would also like to meet the person who built out enough rail for the AirTrain to get to the beginning of the Long Term Parking lot, but not close enough to place a station there.
I bet this is just purely a result of the inefficiencies of Bureaucracy.