Cost Effective Long-term Parking at SFO – Millbrae BART Station

By cigs | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

International terminal main entrance SFO by Don Fulano

The holiday season brings out the traveller in all of us and I was no stranger to the phenomenon. However, the natural instinct to perendinate and my interest in finding a bargain inspired me to seek the best possible deal for my long term parking needs at San Francisco International Airport. Surprisingly, the best option in terms of convenience and cost that I was able to locate was the Millbrae BART Station. In this post, I share my experience in the hope that benefits other budget conscious travelers.

Options – The usual suspects
First, lets take a look at the other options available for us.

Now, unless you’re someone who travels a lot and spends very little time at home, these are amenities that offer little practical value to you. Searching through these available options, finding something under $10 a night is rather difficult.

Alternative – Off the beaten path
This brings us to the option I discovered – the Millbrae BART station parking lot. As it turns out BART runs its own Airport/Longterm parking program. Now, when I evaluated my options I was concerned about two criteria. First, I wanted to minimize my cost. Second, I wanted to ensure that minimizing cost didn’t inconvenience me significantly.

So, first lets examine the cost breakdown of using the Millbrae BART station.

What does this break down to realistically? Lets assume a trip from Friday through Monday for two adults with one piece of luggage each. The total parking cost for such a trip would be $6 x 2 (for Friday and Monday) plus $8 x 2 (for the roundtrip BART fares) to give a total of $28. This is in comparison with a cost of $14 x 4 (Friday through Monday parking)  plus $2 x 2(tipping the shuttle driver for the luggage) = $60. Thus, in this constructed example you effectively received a discount of more than 50% on your parking expenses.

Now, lets look at the second criteria – convenience. Personally, I consider time to be the most significant component of convenience. I can carry my own bags. Therefore, lets look at how much additional time I need when using the Millbrae BART option.

So, based on these calculations you can get from parking your car to your terminal in anywhere between 10 minutes (if all the moons are aligned) to 48 minutes (if everything possible goes wrong). In practice I’d allocate about 30 minutes from parking to Terminal. Give yourself an additional 5 minutes for the first time you visit the Millbrae BART station so that you can get your bearings without adding to your stress.

The best thing about the above is that everything is under your control. The BART is very reliable. You don’t have to worry about traffic, the airport shuttle breaking down, the shuttle driver going on a break. If you get delayed by taking the BART, more often than not it will be due to circumstances completely within your own control.

Now, if we went with one of the “usual suspects” it would take us:

This comes to about 7 minutes (if all the moons are aligned) to 35 minutes (if most things went wrong). Comparing this to the BART option you realize that the time difference between the two options aren’t that significant. Especially if you weren’t a regular traveler where cutting every minute counted.

Is this the right option for you?
So, with all this information in hand – what does your decision boil down to?

Hope your found this useful and wish everyone safe and economical travels!

Update [02/16/2010]

A couple of pointers based on feedback from other readers: