Something I'm curious about! If an airport has 2 parallel active runways side by side and one is used for landing and the other is used for takeoff, is the runway that is closest to the terminal used for take off and the furthest from the terminal used for landing? I'm not sure but it seems that this is the case in FSX. How does the real world handle this?

That is fairly common practice in the real world at busy airports.  That allows the tower to coordinate takeoff releases with runway crossings of the inside runway.

 

That's what I thought. At KSFO P2A had me crossing 28L and taking off on 28R and all ai traffic in front of me was taking off on 28L. Just found it curious that it would do this.

Thanks.

There are many factors that cause P2A to assign a runway...including what runway you have selected for your SID or verbally in your taxi request.  By default, P2A first tries to determine the SIM's assigned runways, but this is not always possible.

If you want a particular runway here's what you can do:

1) Set Force Pilot Runway Selection to ON

2) Add a SID to the runway you want to depart from to your flight plan, or if no SID, request taxi to the runway you want in  your taxi request.

Doing the above will override any other selection criteria and you will be able to depart from the runway of your choice.