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What they do is as a plane arrives, they direct people to the appropriate side. The citizens line process a lot quicker, so as they get empty, some non-citizen
by rogerbinns 8y ago
What they do is as a plane arrives, they direct people to the appropriate side. The citizens line process a lot quicker, so as they get empty, some non-citizen queuers are told to move over to the now mostly empty citizen lines. Then the next plane's passengers arrive and the whole process is repeated. ie the primary goal is that citizens go quick, and the others are second priority. But as you noticed, it starts getting messy as multiple plane arrivals overlap with each other, queues progress at random rates, and it isn't a particular effective system anyway. The booths work the same way as you described China's, but have additional complications (eg people using the app, and the receipt.)
I had the misfortune of arriving on an international flight to SFO when they first got those booths. Some official decided to constantly shout and berate everyone trying to figure them out (he would keep contradicting the screens, or interrupt people trying to read them etc). Thankfully I haven't experienced that since.
And it used to be a lot worse. Instead of a single long queue, there would be long separate queues for each desk. It became quite an art trying to deduce which lines would process quickly.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> The booths work the same way as you described China's, but have additional complications (eg people using the app, and the receipt.) But when you use the Chinese fingerprinting machine, you're not holding up the immigration line. This makes a big difference in queue times! SFO is wasting an incredible amount of passenger time by making everyone in line wait for everyone else to get fingerprinted.
- rogerbinns 8y agoThe last time I went through the lines at SFO there was roughly speaking a queue for the machines, and then after that lines for the booths & officers. If one person took 10 minutes on a machine, it wouldn't matter since the machine queue still flowed as did the booth queue. Have they reorganised it again?
- thaumasiotes 8y agoWhen I entered on the 12th, ten days ago, there were no freestanding fingerprinting machines. (Actually, there was one, but it wasn't in use.) Instead, the immigration booth itself took your fingerprints using a much smaller machine. This is, obviously, a logistical disaster, and I'm stupefied that they were using a better system and threw it out.
- rogerbinns 8y agoThanks for the clarification. My experience has been that every time I use the machines, they then retake the fingerprints and retina at the officer anyway. (This is possibly because I'm a green card holder.) They also seem to have a wide range in staffing levels, and adjust what is "open" based on that. You are right about the efficiency. Quite simply none of the people involved at that level have any incentive to improve it. It won't improve their pay and promotions, and the less efficient the bigger an empire can be built by managers.