Travel Thoughts

I have noticed, in recent flights, that before boarding there is usually an announcement that there is going to be too much luggage for the overhead bins and the airline is therefor offering to check your bag through to your destination for free. So if you have a bag small enough to meet the requirement for overhead storage you can usually save the checked bag charge, typically $35-$50 a bag, by bringing the bag to the gate and checking it there for free.

What are the costs? There is some risk that you will actually have to carry the bag on and stow it. You will have to run the bag through security so cannot use it for a pocket knife or something else that is allowed in checked luggage but not on the flight. You will have to take the bag to the gate. But you still get the benefit of not having to deal with the bag in the plane or transport it from one flight to the connecting flight.

This suggests two things. First, the fact that there are too many carry-on bags to fit in the bins may be a result of the policy of checking bags in for free, with passengers choosing to carry bags on instead of checking them to take advantage of the policy. Second, it might pay the airline to accept checked bags that fit the carry-on size limit for free, thus eliminating or at least reducing the problem of too many bags for the overhead storage and the hassle of dealing with it.

How well this would work depends on why people bring carry-on bags to put in overhead storage instead of checking them. I can think of at least five possible reasons: to save the checked luggage charge, to avoid the risk of having contents of checked luggage stolen or vandalized by the agents that inspect it, to save time by not having to wait for checked luggage at the other end, to have access to the luggage between flights, to avoid the risk of having their checked luggage go to the wrong place and be lost or delayed as a result. The last used to be pretty common. On one trip from London (I think) to Roanoke fifty some years ago, I started with multiple items, lost one on each of three flights although all three eventually got to me. It seems less common now.

The first two of those are problems that would be solved by having your bag checked for free at the gate, the others are not. If those two are the main reason people bring roller bags to the gate the policy of checking them for free is part of the reason there are too many for the overhead storage space. If the first is the main reason, eliminating the charge for bags of suitable size, as Southwest does for the first two bags without the size limit, would eliminate or at least reduce the problem.

TSA

Adding the link to “vandalized” above reminded me of a travel related problem I encountered many years ago and what I deduced from its continued existence. As things are currently set up, TSA agents can go through checked luggage and, if they wish, vandalize it or steal some of the contents. The simple solution is for the note telling you that your luggage has been searched to have a number on it identifying the agent who searched it. That way, if they got complaints from multiple passengers against a single agent, they could investigate and, if the complaints were confirmed, punish him.

I take the failure of TSA to do that, at least as of the last time my luggage was searched, as evidence that they do not care if an agent takes advantage of the opportunity, very possibly would prefer not to know.

Loading Planes

And yet another topic … . Why don’t airlines with assigned seating line up passengers according to where their seats are, starting with those in window seats in reverse order of seat number, march them in and, when they are seated, repeat with middle seat passengers and then aisle. That should greatly reduce the time spent loading the plane, to the benefit of both passengers and airline. No airline that I have seen does it. Southwest does line passengers up for boarding in a prearranged order but it has nothing to do with where they are going to sit.

On The Ground

I have discovered that Washington DC is the one city where Uber is more expensive than a cab, at least from Reagan airport. I discovered this when, after waiting half an hour for an Uber that was supposed to arrive in five minutes and spent almost all of the time standing still, I gave up and took a cab.

The Cost of the Passport System

In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war. (George Orwell, As I Please, Tribune, 12 May 1944)

Each year about 1.4 billion people travel from one country to another. Almost all of them have to go through a passport line each time they cross a border. Many cross more than one border, so figure, at a rough estimate, two billion border crossings one way, four billion counting coming and going. Judging by my experience, the cost in time of standing in a passport line waiting to be let into a country averages about an hour.

Consider that as one cost of our present system of border controls. International travelers are typically, though not always, relatively well off, so I will guess the average cost of an hour of a traveler’s time at fifteen dollars. That gives an estimated cost for that part of the system of sixty billion dollars a year, a very rough calculation but probably the right order of magnitude.

What does the world get for that cost? It makes it a little easier to catch criminals prominent enough so that passport agents all over the world are looking for them and insufficiently enterprising to obtain a fake passport. It makes it a little harder to immigrate into a country that doesn’t want immigrants but not much harder, as the US has been demonstrating on its southern border for many years. Even if the US was willing and able to build Trump’s wall and guard it adequately there are more than sixty million tourists each year. A system of passports and visas gives some control over who comes but it provides no way of making sure they leave. That depends on internal enforcement which, insofar as it works, works as well without passports as with.

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