Agreed. And to make it worse, Clear speeds up the id checking phase of airport security, but that has never been the chokepoint in my experience (it's instead the xray scanner).
Nope, the real benefit of Clear is that once you are past the id check, you waltz past most of the line for the scanner. I suppose that depends on the airport but that's how it works wherever I've been.
If your local airport is incredibly congested, Clear goes from a nice to have to a huge timesaver.
Oh, I agree that Clear is worth using since you get to skip the id line. My point is that Clear isn't making the process any more efficient - they instead created a "skip the line" option under the guise of "technology".
And the tech doesn’t even work that well! Half the time I end up pulling out my ID. They also erased my account this summer in a “system upgrade.” I pictured some poor DBA getting chewed out for deleting thousands of rows by mistake.
If your local airport is incredibly congested, Clear goes from a nice to have to a huge timesaver.