Terminal four, John F. Kennedy International Airport. I am through the bag drop, which in the year 2025 has become totally inhuman. Or at the very least, inhumane.
In the centre of the atrium sit two rows of touchscreen kiosks designed to print baggage labels. There is no designated queue, only a disorganized mob of people circling the perimeter like vultures, waiting for a kiosk to open. Employees with iPads hover around watching carefully to make sure things don’t get hostile. I can only assume they control a device that, when prompted, descends from the ceiling and deploys stun grenades.
Once through, I find myself at the wrong security entrance. This one is for Sky Priority members only. “Head that way”, I’m told. So I walk… and walk…, past Sky Priority, past TSA pre-check, and past Clear. All the while, other plebeians begin falling in line to join me in the search for a gate open to the common man. I feel like Moses leading the Israelites to the promised land, except that our destination isn’t the Levant, it’s an airport Burger King. We reach the entrance to security and settle in an absolutely earth-shattering queue. A queue to end all queues. Might as well have rolled out our sleeping bags right then and there.
Then, an incredibly American thing happens. A group of airport security workers start walking down the queue, shamelessly advertising a subscription to Clear. “Free-trial! Sign up now and skip the line” they say, hawking the product to us like a warden dangling a cookie before a group of prisoners. I feel my blood pressure climbing. Having been corralled into that queue and flanked on both sides by sweaty travellers, of course I want to skip the line!
But then I think to myself, was Clear designed to solve a problem or was a problem designed to sell me Clear? Instead of say, letting a private company divide the security process by tier, could the airport not have invested in better scanners and more workers?
In any case, my very first transport policy recommendation for this blog is: throw the business consultants who pitched that idea to Clear in maximum security prison. You should not be allowed to sell me a product while I’m about to be harassed by a TSA agent.
End of dispatch.
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