SFO Cell Phone Waiting Lot

Good place to wait not too far from pickup terminals. Better here than driving from home and circling terminals that have no parking except when loading. Still hard to find, follow long term parking on San Bruno Ave toward United Maintenance building in front and then left following cell phone lot signs.

Actual address is:
North McDonnell Road and San Bruno Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94128

Quality/Quantity -
Whoever invented this, thought this up, deserves a raise!
So much better than driving in circles.
So much better than pulling over randomly.

Atmosphere - Farther than most cell phone parking lots, but still easy enough to get to and get out of.
Approximately 5 minutes from terminals.
Decent size, well this is SFO.
Plenty of outhouse bathrooms. I did not use them.
Amazingly, they even had working sinks, soap, and paper towels. I did use it, but I did test it out for Yelp.

Cut and pasted from their website:
Maximum wait is 60 minutes
Lot is closed from 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m.
Vehicles must be attended.
Commercial vehicles are not permitted.
Space is available on a first come, first serve basis.
Service - Self-service.

Price - Free.

Owner Comment - Cell phone parking lots were "invented" in 2004. LA and Seattle were the one of the first airports to try this theory.

The Cell Phone Lot is an exit away from the Main Terminals, when I was there it was 7 minute drive away from the International Terminal Arrivals. There's nothing special to report, but in this case no news is good news.

I prefer waiting in a Cell Phone Lot than circling a terminal over and over, using up gas or EV battery.

no access due to cars entering street to access park and call lot. They also block road and no way into it!! third time I have seen this in past month!! Terrible!!

Very convenient, close to the airport, free of charge. Great place to wait if you're picking someone up.

Located at a distance of 2 miles from SFO airport, this parking lot is perfect if you're looking to wait for a few minutes before picking up someone from the airport. The directions heading to this lot are fairly clear and it's free to wait here for up to 60 minutes. Highly recommended.

Safe, well lit. Allows for 60 minute waits. Within 2 miles of SFO. Take North Access Road off I 380.

The SFO cell phone lot is about 1.5 miles away from the pick-up terminals at SFO. This is a good place to wait if your friend / passenger you're picking up has landed, but is at baggage claim waiting for their luggage. (You can't linger outside on the curbside for too long, security will force you to keep driving and circle around the terminals). I was here a few nights ago while picking up a family member from SFO. Fairly lighted and there were many other cars waiting as well.

I have written very few 1-star reviews, but the SFO Cell Phone Waiting Lot, in terms of the overall experience for an occasional user or for someone from out of town who has never used it before, is worse than bad. It is a CRIME!

The actual lot, IF YOU CAN FIND IT, is just fine. It feels reasonably safe and well lit, and the few times I've used it, it has never been full. But finding it is the problem! And it can be a huge, dangerous, and frustrating problem.

Cell phone waiting lots are a great idea. Rather than driving around and around the airport and navigating through the terminals multiple times while waiting for a delayed party to come outside, you can just go park in the cell phone lot, relax, read the news on your smartphone, and wait for your party to text you. Then it's just a 4 minute drive to get back inside the airport and pick them up. Cell phone waiting lots minimize airport traffic, pollution, and noise, and reduce the chances of fender benders, making the passenger pick-up experience much less chaotic for everyone.

Someone needing the Cell Phone Waiting Lot only needs one thing. That's why it's great that SFO has such nice, distinct, single-purpose signs leading drivers to this lot. When you first drive into the airport and drive through the terminals to pick someone up on the Arrivals level, where airport security personnel rigidly and strenuously enforces the no-waiting rule, the signage for the Cell Phone Waiting Lot is GOOD. If just 2 or 3 more of these nice matching signs, with dark blue background and clear white text, were placed where a driver could easily see them, I would say EXCELLENT. But after you've passed by a few of these signs, there are suddenly no more to be found!

That's because they changed the shape and size of the next sign related to the cell phone lot, and changed the background to yellow, changed the text size, and changed the color of the text to black. PLUS, the text now deals with TWO very different subjects: rental car return and the cell phone waiting lot, and it's so wordy and so different looking from the previous, good, single-purpose Cell Phone Waiting Lot signs, that you are likely to fail to read the part of the big yellow sign that deals with the cell phone lot ... and suddenly you realize you are hopelessly lost!

NOW you're in the midst of one of THE most complicated airport-terminal-return ramp, and multiple-freeway-onramp interchanges IN THE WHOLE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, and you have NO friggin' IDEA where the cell phone lot is. So you randomly choose 1 of 5 random ramps and invariably get on the wrong freeway or get stuck going back through the terminals again. If you get on the wrong freeway, then you have to figure out how to get back to the airport, and then, realizing that finding the cell phone lot is hopeless, you end up going around and around in circles through the airport while waiting for your party.

After you finally get back to the airport, you might try again. "Maybe it's my fault. Maybe I should have looked more carefully and I wouldn't have missed a sign." But unfortunately, it WASN'T your fault, it was the fault of whoever has responsibility for signage at the airport. That person should be fired and blacklisted!

Even after you've gotten within shouting distance of the cell phone lot, there is a T-intersection where you can turn left or right, and as you frantically look for a Cell Phone Waiting Lot sign, you come up with nothing, and when the light changes, you have to make a random choice, left or right. That's because there has been ANOTHER change of signage, and a big, differently shaped, wordy yellow sign with black text, mounted high and in the middle of the intersection, likely escaped your attention.

After 2 or 3 failures, you might finally find the actual lot. It's as if they were too cheap to place enough signs where drivers would naturally see them and too stupid to realize the importance of keeping these signs consistent in size, shape, and message!

After you finally "hack" the system and learn where the lot is located, it's actually easy to get to it. If I went to the airport often I'd have no problem. But picking someone up there just once or twice a year, I've had to re-learn the surprisingly long route anew each time! (You actually have to leave the airport and go 3/4 of a mile north on Highway 101 and then go into a complicated industrial lot and navigate 5 turns to actually enter the Cell Phone Waiting Lot!)

Remember I said "dangerous"? While all this stressful driving and frantic searching for signs is going on, your party is calling you and texting you! And people unfamiliar with the airport are merging suddenly, cutting you off, honking. It's truly a nightmare, and the whole mess is totally unnecessary. And I used to be a big-city cab driver! Things like this don't normally faze me. This has been a problem at SFO for over 5 years!

Porta potty if needed, with hand wash stations. Handicap parking available. Much bigger than the old lot. Save yourself the parking garage costs, just wait here for free.

Okay so this is a recent concept I love. Most major airports have an area these days that you can park and wait for people arriving by plane. This allows you to pre stage yourself close, but not have to keep driving around in circles while you wait.

In the case of the SFO Airport cell phone lot , it is located about 5 minutes away right next to the car rental center. Once you get the call you zip down the bay front road and boom you are at the departure terminal.

As an added plus for plane junkies such as myself the parking lot is inline with 28L/28R so you get to see all kinds of widebody jets taking off. In the 20 minutes I waited I was treated to a A350, 2 777-200LR's, and 747F, and pair of 787's) Heck I may just camp out there in the future to plane spot LOL

You could get really out of the box and have someone your picking up take the tram to the rental center and avoid all fo the chaos all together.

The lot is semi patrolled and it is a bit isolated but otherwise its a fantastic spot to kill time yet stay close to the terminal if you need to pick someone up.