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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

The line sorter can create an incentive for people to take less time at the screener if all the fast looking people get to go together. You may have noticed the elite traveler lines sometimes that people can self select into. In a recent trip to Costa Rica, there was a persons travelling without children line that went incredibly faster than the persons with children line. Some line sorters may be serving this function.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Robin, your observation that by being sorted your delay is longer on average than the line you would have chosen is bogus.

Consider these two possibilities

1) Lines are sorted by a mechanism we don't know, with the constraint that all scanning stations are offered traffic constantly.

2) Lines are self-sorted, with the constraint that all scanning stations are offered traffic constantly.

If traffic is offered constantly, the total throughput in 1) and 2) is identical. Then for you to have an average shorter wait time in situation 2) requires that everybody else in the line with you has a slightly longer wait time.

You could only get through the self-chosen line faster by beating out your fellow line-mates.

As to the rest of it, I think the likely ideas have all been hit in these comments. Mostly, make sure people are prepping up to keep offered traffic at the bottleneck steady. Secondarily, I have seen partially hidden screeners that needed traffic directed to them to keep their offered traffic steady. Finally, I have seen these sorters participate in shutting down offered traffic to a station that was closing, and in reconfiguring the line physically to adjust for opening and closing of stations. There real value could be primarily episodic, unrevealed by a cursory glance.

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