Let's be honest about the state of things: OAK has been losing ground for years. Southwest — once the airport's bread and butter — has been scaling back under new leadership, and now Spirit's shutdown removes yet another option from an already thin menu. For the millions of East Bay and South Bay residents who live closer to Oakland than SFO, this is genuinely bad news.

As one local put it bluntly: "Oakland is so convenient for so many of us, and yet the options keep getting worse."

The question now is whether anyone steps in to fill the gap. The optimistic case isn't crazy — the FAA has been cutting arrival capacity at SFO, and Oakland's branding dispute (the whole "San Francisco Bay Oakland" saga) recently got resolved. There's theoretically room for a domestic carrier to set up shop and compete. But theory and practice are very different things in the airline industry.

One Bay Area resident captured the mood perfectly: "The heart wants JetBlue to return, but the brain says it's probably going to be Allegiant." Ouch. Another predicted Southwest would simply absorb whatever profitable routes remain, noting that "no one else is interested in competing with the United SFO superfortress."

Here's the free-market reality: airlines go where the money is, and right now SFO offers more routes at competitive prices. The result is a vicious cycle — fewer OAK options push more passengers to SFO, which makes OAK even less attractive to carriers.

But competition matters. Having two functional airports keeps fares lower and gives Bay Area travelers choices. When one airport becomes a de facto monopoly hub, consumers lose. We've seen this movie before in other metro areas, and it never ends with cheaper tickets.

Oakland doesn't need a government bailout or some harebrained subsidy scheme. It needs a carrier willing to bet on an underserved market full of people who'd rather drive 20 minutes to OAK than fight the 101 to SFO. Those passengers exist — someone just has to show up and serve them.

RIP to those $29 Spirit flights to Vegas, though. Gone but not forgotten.