news of the weird

[calimac]

A couple odd things going on locally that might not have hit the broader news feeds:

1. In California we have what's called the jungle primary, in which all the candidates of whatever party run together, and the top two finishers, whatever their party, go into the general election.

But what happens if two candidates are tied for second place?

That happened in the race for an open congressional seat hereabouts, an attractive prospect for many a local officeholder. One candidate led, and two others kept shifting for second place as more votes were counted, and eventually ended up tied.

The answer is, all three of them will make the final ballot. This isn't my district, but it's interesting to watch.

2. Oakland International Airport has decided it needs more respect. Like many cities, San Francisco has more than one convenient airport but not everybody knows about it. San Francisco International is about 15 miles from downtown; Oakland International is across the Bay but is only about 20 miles from downtown SF, and both are served by the rapid transit system. (Oakland is also less likely to get fogged in.)

But Oakland has been losing flight slots because people don't know to use it. So now they want to change the name to San Francisco Bay Oakland International, a mouthful but like SFO it is right on the Bay and this will let people know where it is. But the SFO administration are annoyed by this; they say it's confusing. I must admit some sympathy with that position, remembering some misleading airport designations in my past, and especially since an Oakland administrator said "No one owns the title to the San Francisco Bay."

That's the sort of snotty remark you make only if you know you'd be confusing the customers and are deliberately planning to do so.

Comments

[kevin_standlee]

I'm glad that when reading through the various suggestions for Popular Ratification, it dawned on me that there might be a tie when mutually contradictory proposals were up for ratification, and where only the version with the most Yes votes could win. Thus I put in a tie-breaker (the Business Meeting of the Worldcon doing the ratification vote picks the winner). It's not perfect, but it doesn't require another year of voting, which was the only other thing I could think of.

In California's case, I assume that if nobody gets a majority in the general election they'll have to have a run-off between the top two. They would have been better off using Instant Runoff/Ranked Choice Voting.

[calimac]

I've read an article which says that in this case there could be a plurality winner. I don't know if that's an accurate assumption.

[athenais]

I really think the OAK name change proposal is a terrible idea. It absolutely will confuse everyone. Besides, the main reason to fly to/from Oakland is the cheaper prices because their gates aren't as expensive and it's more convenient for East Bay residents than the other airports. They don't have as many international flights, but they have the basics to Europe and Asia. It's certainly not convenient for people who live on the peninsula. Anyway, it makes me grumpy. I hope it fails.

[calimac]

Occasionally in the past I'd find that the best flight was out of Oakland and I'd go there, but it's damned difficult to get to from here (Sunnyvale), at just about any time because traffic on 880 is never light during the day. But it rarely has the best flights any more, which I suppose is what management is trying to change.

On the other hand, when I lived in Berkeley it was the only airport I used.

There was also the period, before BART came to SFO, when OAK was the easiest mass transit connection to downtown SF, if that's where one was going. I recommended it a lot to people coming to Potlatch there in those days.