People refer to Portland as PDX a lot. Perhaps it’s a trend.

If you travel at all for work, you find that some cities have a second airport miles outside the city, or there are lots of cities with two names. The airport codes for different cities then start to become synonyms for the cities because that's what you type when you're going there.

Other people have different reasons for doing things, everything is weird when you think about it, and when you think about it a little more you realize that means that nothing is weird, just different.

FWIW that was my second thought; my first thought was "wow that's super convenient!!!"... and then I was sorely disappointed :(.

Especially weird since SFO is not in San Francisco.

Well, I think it’s just as weird to refer to it as “the City,” as if there aren’t literally over 100 cities in the 9 Bay Area counties.

It's optimal IMO. Anything shorter is too ambiguous, anything longer is longer than it needs to be.

"ATL" got lucky. I couldn't think of anything else to call our city in just three letters.

Plus our airport itself is huge. "Busiest airport in the world" (usually).

It must be a Canadian who wrote that