SFO Cell Phone Waiting Lot
.San Francisco Airport recently added a “Cell phone waiting lot”, which provides an alternative to endlessly circling the arrivals area. It’s not that easy to find, and the signs for it aren’t that prominent. To find it, you follow the signs for “Long-Term Parking” until you see a sign that has a cell phone on it.
It’s the green mark on this map. It really doesn’t take long to get to either arrival area from there, and I’m glad they added it.
If you’re ever in a situation where you need to meet someone at the airport and they are also picking up a rental car (clearly an edge case, but you never know), the “choke point”, i.e. the nearest you can get to where they’ll be exiting with their rental car, is the blue mark on the same map. You could park there (illegally), or you could provide them with a copy of that map segment in advance and direct them to the cell phone waiting lot, which should be easy enough to find once they take a right turn coming out of the rental area. The blue mark is the last place you can turn around if you’re approaching the “rental car return” area (which is on plenty of signs, so should be easy to find once in the airport). I strongly suggest trying to meet in the cell phone waiting lot rather than waiting at the point indicated by the blue mark.
Oh, and the cell phone lot is closed between 01:00 and 05:00.
This has been a tadhg.com public service announcement.