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In the early 1990s I was very late for a flight. My friend dropped me off at the departure area; I got out of the car 5 minutes before departure time. I ran t

• ido 4y ago
  I don’t know where your faith that deregulating and privatizing would help the experience comes from. Here in Europe once they privatized parts of rail travel the experience got markedly worse. I moved to Europe about 20 years ago and it used to be much more of a pleasure taking trains with the EU (mostly talking about long range international trains within Central Europe) even not that long ago. Specifically in Germany the experience seems to have only gotten worse (both with quality of service and punctuality).
  • saurik 4y ago
    FWIW, in the US an airport doesn't actually have to use the TSA: the government can't actually quite mandate a single vendor like that here; there thereby exist private companies that operate to the TSA specification, and an airport can go with one of them instead. The airport in San Francisco (SFO) is the only one I have ever seen do this, using a vendor named CAS... and while the experience is mandated to suck a lot, it still sucks a lot less than the TSA as the CAS employees seem to get that they are just security technicians, not officers of the state (a distinction the TSA people don't understand, but also applies to them: the police at the airport, for example, have lots of jurisdiction over them, as far as I understand).
    • ido 4y ago
      I don’t understand though, why upon learning the government does something poorly the first reaction would be to replace it with private contractors rather than demand your government does better? Some things are public services and shouldn’t be profit motivated.
      • BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
        The problem is that such demands for a government that does better often go absolutely nowhere. As a result voters feel like it is easier to replace contractors than it is to replace politicians. Given the very high rate of incumbency, this isn’t entirely unfounded.
        • ido 4y ago
          And what would you do to force SF to replace the private contractor they use for their airport if you end up not liking it? Your avenue is exactly the same as protesting against a public service.
          • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
            If SF's contractor got caught killing a dude over bootleg smokes or kneeling on a guy until he died you can bet your ass they'd either be out or they'd be doing everything in their power to make people happy with them going forward. Try that with a state sponsored security force.
            • ido 4y ago
              But the article we're talking about isn't about homicide, but about much more pedestrian lack of efficiency and corruption (the price of airport food in NYC).
      • noirbot 4y ago
        Because it's generally been borderline impossible to force a large national government to do something better. It's legitimately easier a lot of the time to force a multinational corporation to change than the government. Since the TSA is generally a federally controlled agency, you'd have to elect a majority of the House/Senate/Executive to change policy there to make it better, and literally no one will run for those offices with even a minor part of their platform being improving the TSA. Even if they had a position you liked about airport security, would you be willing to look past a difference on something like gun laws or school funding or environmental issues to vote for someone who was going to make the TSA more effective? If your answer is no, that's why people have no real hope that the government would improve the TSA.
  • eastern 4y ago
    True. It's a false idea that privatisation improves anything. Most private good and services are better because of competition, not because of the ownership. If privatisation means opening up a line of business to all comers, it's good. When it means a limited number of suppliers chosen by an authority, it's almost always worse.
    • nobody9999 4y ago
      >True. It's a false idea that privatisation improves anything. Most private good and services are better because of competition, not because of the ownership. Absolutely. So let's have competition with multiple private contractors at every airport, paid by the number of passengers who choose to use a particular contractor to go through security. That would solve every problem, as the market will optimize for maximum passenger satisfaction at security checkpoints, especially if they can get more people through faster. What could go wrong? /s
      • eastern 4y ago
        Privatisation has nothing to offer if there is no competition. If there is no competition possible--and there are so many other situations apart from airport security--then a publicly owned provider is better. There _are_ some things that are a natural monopoly but if there must be a monopoly then it should be a government one. A private monopoly is the worst of all worlds.
        • nobody9999 4y ago
          Poe's law[0] strikes again! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • efitz 4y ago
        I know you’re being sarcastic but you’re inadvertently correct. Very quickly “no security airlines” would go out of business as no one would want to risk their life needlessly, especially if the lack of security led to an incident. However an airline that used nonintrusive, convenient methods for security, fmight find a loyal passenger following.
• hattmall 4y ago
  Flying out of ATL with TSA precheck takes all of about 1 minute.
  • kortilla 4y ago
    This is complete bullshit from the delay of scale riding the “plane train” alone. TSA precheck in ATL takes min 5 minutes on a good day. Setting that aside again, airlines have now even taken the liberty of telling you “boarding doors close 5 minutes before departure and won’t be reopened”. Travel today is so shitty you can’t even fathom what it could be.
    • dannyw 4y ago
      How is a plane supposed to depart on the departure time if the doors aren’t closed and checks aren’t done?
      • AgentOrange1234 4y ago
        I wonder how many checks require the door to be closed?
    • FabHK 4y ago
      > boarding doors close 5 minutes before departure Err... 5 minutes is extremely generous. Emirates closes the gates 15 mins prior to departure; AirAsia, Qatar Airways, 20 mins; EasyJet 25 mins.
• noirbot 4y ago
  Inflation adjusted, I'd be seriously curious how much you paid for that flight. My general understanding is that a ton of the "flying used to be nice" anecdotes are because in the 90s and before, almost everyone was flying at a cost/service level that's essentially what first class is now. So, yes, everything sucks more now, but it's also far more affordable, and part of how it became more affordable was that the mid to late 90s brought the first wave of budget airlines like Airtran that lowered service and legroom and the like but made it cheaper. There's a common refrain about a lot of things - air travel and the internet most of all, that amount to "this thing was better when it was a luxury service for only the rich."
  • bagels 4y ago
    Southwest Airlines has existed since the 1967. Maybe flying is cheaper now inflation adjusted, but I was able to buy airline tickets as a college student in the late 90s/2000s.
  • standyro 4y ago
    Thats a fair point. I just flew to Europe for <$600 on a direct flight. Pretty sure that wasn’t even possible in the 90s, adjusted for inflation. Prices are definitely lower and more competitive. The experience has gotten somewhat worse though, unless you go through all the annoying hoops of TSA Pre/Global Entry/credit cards with Airport lounges etc etc
    • boring_twenties 4y ago
      My first ever trip that I paid for myself was a round trip from NYC to Amsterdam in 2001, and I remember exactly how much I paid: $420
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  > What strikes me today is that EVERY SINGLE THING ABOUT FLYING SUCKS. Airports are just part of the problem. And yet people keep flying. As long as the price is low enough there are enough customers who will endure the pain. Things will change when more people stop flying.
  • twiddling 4y ago
    because driving sucks even more
    • noirbot 4y ago
      And even with high-speed rail, a lot of distances in the US would still be brutally slow, even with direct point-to-point rail. At some point, trying to go from NYC to DC, let alone St. Louis or Atlanta, takes a pretty long time via non-plane methods. In some ways, the big innovation of plane travel is that for major cities, non-stop flights are an option, so it's hard to beat the speed of it. There's never going to be a viable non-stop train from, say, Miami to DC, but if it stops in Jacksonville, Atlanta, Greenville, Winston-Salem, and Richmond, then you've added hours to the trip time in stops/slowing down, which loses people as well who don't want to spend the whole day on a train. There's a breakpoint around 4-5 hours where travel doesn't eat your full day, and there's only so many routes where you could get under that duration and still have enough volume of people to take it to make it worth running the route.
    • JohnFen 4y ago
      I think driving is far superior to flying in every way except one: travel speed.
      • boring_twenties 4y ago
        I prefer driving myself, but fatalities per traveler per mile are another way flying is far superior.
        • JohnFen 4y ago
• osigurdson 4y ago
  >> EVERY SINGLE THING ABOUT FLYING SUCKS Except the eventual 1000 km / hour part
• JohnFen 4y ago
  > I know this sounds extreme but they need to deregulate and privatize every single thing about the airline industry The massive deregulation that already happened is a very large part of why flying sucks. It's also a very large part of why it's cheap. You makes your choice and picks your poison.