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This is no more confusing than Washington, DC having three airports, only one of which is right next to DC. The Bay Area is hard enough to get around as it is, and BART goes to both airports. Depending on where you need to go, OAK may in fact be closer, even for people who want to go to SF.

But they would have been better off going with "Oakland San Francisco Bay" or even "Oakland East Bay". After all, one of those DC airports is named "Baltimore/Washington", so people clearly understand what it is closest to.

I was going to propose that it was similar to NY/Newark Airport being in NJ, but then I looked it up and it's official name is "Newark Liberty", with NY nowhere in the name. But this might be because so much of the transportation infrastructure in the area (including the 3 NY airports) are jointly manged by the Port Authority, a formal partnership between NY and NJ. Does the Bay Area have any similar organization that can coordinate across city and county lines? If not, and they have to rely on the State for all that, it could explain why they don't talk to each other, and have to resort to lawsuits.

What a world where two city’s are suing each other over a trademark.

Wait until San Francisco finds out where Detroit Metro Airport is located.

Big "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" energy

It is kinda shitty but the airport is literally on the bay.

I don't think that the city of San Francisco should get to own the term "San Francisco Bay". The city of San Francisco (population 808,437) is only a minority part of the San Francisco Bay Area (population 9.71 million)

None of that is to say that the airport should be called that, but I don't think I like the city of San Francisco heading in this direction.

EDIT: Though if the city of San Francisco wants to have a name more-distinct from the whole San Francisco Bay Area, they could do a rename:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

The city has officially been known as San Francisco since 1847, when Washington Allon Bartlett, then serving as the city's alcalde, renamed it from Yerba Buena (Spanish for "Good Herb"), which had been name used throughout the Spanish and Mexican eras since approximately 1776. The name Yerba Buena continues to be used in locations in the city, such as on Yerba Buena Island and in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Yerba Buena Gardens.

"Yerba Buena" kinda rolls off the tongue nicely, and the ICAO code "YBO" appears to be free if SFO wants it.

EDIT2: And the San Francisco Bay had the name before the city-currently-known-as-San-Francisco adopted it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay

The first recorded European discovery of San Francisco Bay was on November 4, 1769, when Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá, unable to find the Port of Monterey, continued north close to what is now Pacifica and reached the summit of the 1,200-foot-high (370 m) Sweeney Ridge, now marked as the place where he first sighted San Francisco Bay. Portolá and his party did not realize what they had discovered, thinking they had arrived at a large arm of what is now called Drakes Bay.[12] At the time, Drakes Bay went by the name Bahia de San Francisco and thus both bodies of water became associated with the name. Eventually, the larger, more important body of water fully appropriated the name San Francisco Bay.

Here's an 1845 map of California with the city of Yerba Buena on the Bahia de San Francisco:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/71/2a/2a/712a2a6af54c1eef7bdabee9488c8862.jpg

Regionalize it. There needs to be a transit coordination for the region that includes marketing.

Years back, Manchester New Hampshire renamed their airport “Manchester-Boston Regional Airport” and there was certainly some contention. However I remember seeing plans to coordinate flights, trains, park and rides, among Logan, Manchester, Green, Hanscom, and Worcester. Back then regionalizing made sense because Logan was so overcrowded, while the others could be much cheaper or more convenient, depending n where in the “Boston Region” you were.

I haven’t heard anything like that in years though: Logan was rebuilt to support more flights, the Big Dig and Silver Line transit made it much faster to get to Logan, plus Acela freed up the skyways a bit

If you don’t speak the local language or aren’t familiar with the area, look at a map. Ask online. Do something to cover your butt. If anyone going to any airport in the world is confused because they don’t understand the local language, then it’s their own fault for not planning their trip carefully. If I (an American) was spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on a plane ticket, you can be damn sure I’d triple check the name and location of the airport to be sure it was the one I wanted to go to.

Having said that, San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport is an unnecessarily confusing, cumbersome name. Come on, Oakland. You can do better.

Orlando Sanford international airport has entered the chat.

I love the Seattle area Airport. The port authority annexed it its own 10 square mile city called "SeaTac" directly in between Seattle and Tacoma (literally just a portmanteau of the two cities' names), and called it SeaTac Airport.

Now nobody that isn't already familiar with the area knows where the Airport is from its name.