SFO and HSR

This comes from an April 2005 interview with John Martin, the head of San Francisco International Airport.

Q: How do airport managers feel about establishing high-speed rail for California? Do you support the high-speed rail initiative?

A: The airport commission has come on record in support of high-speed rail. We think it would reduce the number of flights here, and we would see a 5 to 8 percent drop in passenger traffic if high-speed rail is introduced. The markets it would help us with — markets like Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego — are markets that are primarily served by smaller aircraft. So we might see an even bigger percentage reduction in the number of flights.

At SFO, we would like to see a station right across the freeway from the international terminal and we would extend our AirTrain system to connect to the high-speed rail.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/articles/2005/04/29/columnists/challenges_and_opportunities/20050429_co03_challenges.txt

So again, we see that airports and high speed rail can work in concert. If they clear out the smaller planes, they gain capacity, especially runway capacity, for bigger planes. The airport makes more money from bigger planes. Rail covers the markets it can serve best, feeding the markets that airplanes serve best. SFO grows as an interchange.