[tptacek]

I fly a fair amount and don't find that I wait significantly longer for airport security now than I did before 9/11. I don't like the TSA any more than you do, but I don't think they're the major cause of commercial airport delays.

[temphn]

But of course they are, or more general the web of DHS/TSA/FAA/etc. regulations is the reason why commercial air travel has not advanced in door-to-door speed.

Without the regulations you could imagine an airport that pre-screened travellers. You roll up to the curb, get valet parked, and your bags checked, and then you get on the flight. You'd build the entire airport around this rapid on/off experience. You could have an airline that would run an Uber-style service to pick you up at your door. You'd solve the whole problem.

But there's no Toyota-style optimizations applied because these optimizations are illegal. Prime among them is that efficiency of this kind would make the airport more of a target IF it was also prevented by law from discriminating against potential dangerous passengers, which it would be.

And that's why when you ban selectivity at the federal level the necessary consequence is mediocrity.

[mseebach]

> pre-screened travellers

The problem is that you can't reliably pre-screen for terrorists, the signal is plainly undetectable in the noise - there are 95 million passengers a year at Atlanta alone and 19 hijackers on 9/11.

You're bound to get a lot of false positives, and then what do you do with them? In the meantime, the actual terrorists just wait until they successfully get a guy pre-screened, and he then just walks on board with a bomb.

[snowwrestler]

Pre-screening is not only legal, it has just been expanded to the general public.

[temphn]

You can't run an airline that is free to exclude any passenger at will. TSA pre-check is based on the fallacious inference that rich frequent flyers and terrorists are a distinct set. Saudi royal-funded operatives may well be more likely to be frequent flyers than the general population.

[Dylan16807]

It's more that if you didn't flag them the first N times you're rather unlikely to flag them in the future. The screening isn't perfect but screening these people more won't help.

[objclxt]

In the case of California and the SFO-LA route, isn't it pretty much universally acknowledged that SFO is one of the better airports for security, precisely because it's not run by the TSA but out-sourced instead?