Geneva Airport Cuts Wait Times by Half | Hacker News Reader

Geneva Airport Cuts Wait Times by Half

blipsystems.com

92 pointsbliptrack61 comments

The TSA and state of travel in the US constantly reminds me - "America is not a Country, it's a business" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCEDUiqfO-w

From trying to make revenue by creating "premium security" (see also pre-check, are you kidding me with this?), to reducing their workforce after already hiring the most apathetic, underpaid, and undereducated people I've encountered running security for airports.

Flying to Japan several times this year via LAX, airports in the US are not only some of the worst run (security-wise), but also the most unwelcoming anywhere I've been.

Last time I arrived back into the States, the immigration officers checking passports were full on wearing bullet proof vests. What is that about? What kind of way is that to welcome anyone into the country?

> Last time I arrived back into the States, the immigration officers checking passports were full on wearing bullet proof vests.

I assume it's because they are full officers of US Customs and Border control. They are usually armed as well.

If you walk into a USCIS office building in the US they are all wearing bullet proof vests too. I thought it was overkill personally.

This was not my experience. In the Honolulu office everyone except the guards were wearing aloha.

From crossing the border between the US and Canada regularly both US and Canadian officers are equipped with gear and armed. They are likely Bulletin Proof or Stab Jackets. You really never know what is going to happen

Wish I had a bulletin proof jacket...

It's a perk of the job, but only if you understand how they see their jobs...

Given that the TSA is security theater why not improve the theater part? The current production values are so low... everyone wears the same costumes, repeats the same lines, no plot to speak of. No need to shoot for a Tony award... but at least have a few clowns and balloons... or even a "dinner and theater" option where you can at least get a snack. Maybe add a bit of modern drama and have the players fake a big relationship fight every 20 minutes. Or maybe have a "splash lane" where players and audience interact with water balloons. Come on... almost anything would be more fun to watch.

At least it's participatory theater. And they offer a massage if you don't want to do the hands-up dance, although it's usually pretty half-hearted.

The key wasn't so much the optimizations it was the fact they started collecting data in real time and was able to do proper forecasting and measurements. A big problem with BigCo's like this is they are slow to change.

This shows how important data collection is to improving performance in any system (beyond "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it..."). Rather than after-the-fact analysis, the improvements could be rolled out faster as experiment results are backed up with live data. Making it less risky for management.

Plus they could easily continue doing multiple ongoing experiments in different aisles, without a big investment in 'waterfall' style optimizations.

Meanwhile, TSA paid $1.4M for Randomizer app that chooses left or right.

0.http://www.geek.com/apps/tsa-paid-1-4-million-for-randomizer...

"It could be IBM supplied all the iPads and training as well as the app itself"

It's still at least $330,000 just for the app, according to the documents.

My company is currently looking to bid on a government software project, and if we where to deliver 100% of what they're asking for exactly as written in the spec we're estimating a cost of at least $2 million, with some pretty serious R&D efforts on our part. On the the other hand if we where allowed to deliver 80-90% of what they they're asking for and 100% of what they actually need it would probably cost around $100-150k, using standardized solutions and very little R&D.

Basically government specs often contain some really crazy requirements written by people who only have a vague idea of what they actually need and no idea of how hard things are to implement. I have no trouble believing that at least $250k of those $330k went towards fulfilling some obscure bullet point which some bureaucrat required, but which had no practical effect on the final product.

[joke] Come on, putting together a face-recognition system that attributes ethnicity using the iPad's camera isn't cheap!

I expect most of it was spent on bureaucracy and trying to figure out what they actually needed.

Yea, people forget how much effort that can be.

I delivered a project last year where if you where to just look at the very simple final product and look at how much it cost you'd accuse us of either incompetence or corruption. However what you won't see are the two more complex prototypes I made according to first the original spec and then the revised spec, all the meetings (with travel time, since they where two towns over and always wanted all the meetings to be held in their offices) it took for the client to eventually realize that they actually wanted something much simpler and the massive efforts of collecting the all the data (in various obscure formats) needed to put together that simple solution.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417050

Meanwhile in America:

[...] The TSA has about 42,000 officers on the job, down from 47,000 in 2013, while the annual volume of passengers has risen from 643 million to 740 million during those years, Cox said. [...]

Seattle wait times are approaching 90 minutes (personal experience)

Seattle recently hired a bunch of private contractors, partially to serve as more warm bodies, and partially to put the TSA on notice that they can be replaced.

Anecdotally, I went through Seattle TSA at about 6am on the 3rd of this month, and wait times were under fifteen minutes.

Went thru both Bos and Sfo recently. Waits were under 15 mins for mid morning flights. Looks like they've improved since their horrendous peaks.

SFO doesn't use TSA, they have a private firm doing security. Not sure about Boston.

An article at blipsystems.com about a organization's great success with Blip Systems, posted by a user named bliptrack.

By the numbers:

> GVA has been able to reduce the average waiting time at security by 51% from an average of 7 minutes to 3.5 minutes. In addition, the airport has increased the number of days with satisfactory performance more than five times (from 54 days in 2014 to 297 days in 2015).

> the airport aims for 85% of all passengers experiencing less than seven minutes of waiting time in the security process and that no passengers are allowed to wait more than 20 minutes. """

GVA was the best experience I've ever had in an airport - was through security in under a minute, in fact, it was so quick I had to ask for my bag back from the conveyor as my boarding pass was still in there.

This is good but I believe Amsterdam Schiphol airport does it as good, if not better. The conveyor belts at security are manned with staff to give advice or answer questions and curved so that 3 people can place their items on at a time (kinda like a blackjack table curved around the dealer). The millimetre wave scanner takes only a second and staff are prompt and courteous.

Perhaps most importantly though, they had 4 or 5 sets up and running at the same time. The overall process took me about 15 seconds of waiting and maybe 2 minutes once I got to the belt (I had a lot of stuff to unpack).

>they had 4 or 5 sets up and running at the same time.

It seems so obvious, and yet apparently it needs drawing attention to. Any time that I have been stuck in a too slow airport queue, whether it's been a security queue or border control, there's always been empty desks.

Step 1 of avoiding delays is to have all your desks manned, or at least have people on site and on standby to man them if there's a surge.

I'm sure they would have all the desks manned, if it didn't cost money to do so.

That's in no way the customers problem, and you aren't going to capture the custom of anyone by explaining what a hard done by sod you are.

You want me to transit via the UK, spending my money in the heathrow airport and on british airline connection flights?

Dig a little deeper into your pockets and man the fucking desks, or like Veratyr I'll transit via Schipol who it would seem aren't so badly managed they can't turn superior service into a profit margin.

I'll just add that this was definitely a concern when I planned my flights. I chose Schiphol and KLM airlines rather than another European airport or even a US airport precisely because of how well I'd heard it was run.

The solution used at Geneva Airport is also used at Schiphol Airport ;-)

I wrote about Dublin Airport doing this without passenger permission a few months ago.

"Is Dublin Airport tracking passenger phones without their permission?"

https://medium.com/@roryireland/is-dublin-airport-tracking-p...

And yet this is still abysmal. Talk to me when my plane onboarding experience is exactly that of a train. A recent study showed something like 90% of threats are missed. So remove what we have installed now, switch to passive-only methods, and don't bother me. Let me walk straight in, check luggage if necessary, and go sit at my gate. And while we're at it let my friends and family join me. Well trained humans and dogs (and, sure, robots) can keep me safe in the background.

Have you been to Geneva? Most of the time I go from the train station to the gate in 20 minutes, including security.

My point was we shouldn't have to wait for security checks at all. There are many other high-human density targets for terrorism (buses, trains, buildings, etc.) none of which require security checks. Why are airports / flying any different? Fear mongering by capitalistic stake holders is my opinion. Granted, I'm a jaded American who has to experience the joke that is the TSA. And I haven't experienced Geneva yet (would love to), but 20m is much happier than your average US airport.

> There are many other high-human density targets for terrorism (buses, trains, buildings, etc.) none of which require security checks. Why are airports / flying any different?

Because airplanes are giant 600mph flying bombs that can destroy large portions of major urban centers.

I am as dismayed by the disaster that is the TSA as you or anyone, but let's not totally lose sight of the plot here.

There must be 1000s of places along train tracks in the US alone where a strategically-placed derailing device[1] could wreak the same, if not more, terror. I'm unconvinced planes pose a greater risk to life loss and that is the point IMO.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derail

I seriously doubt a derailing train could take down an entire skyscraper.

I doubt an airplane ever has.

Ironically, the security line is a high human-density target.

It's (sort of) already happened - [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Los_Angeles_International...

Indeed. It would be easy to bomb a high-density waiting line at airport security. You could put quite a large bomb in a suitcase and just wheel it in!

They are collecting the MAC address of the WIFI / Bluetooth in your mobile/Tablet. Good example of Internet of Things, I am wondering if they are using Kafka / Cassandra to process all this data in realtime.

That´s correct. Please see the privacy document here: http://77.66.117.45/~blipsyst//wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Bl...

Possibly a dumb question, but how are they grabbing Bluetooth MAC addresses? My understanding was that you only broadcasted you MAC address in discoverable mode, and that after pairing, MAC addresses are entirely forgone in favor of master-slave addressing and frequency hopping synchronization.

And meanwhile in the United States the TSA clowns solution is to tell people to get to the airport two hours before you flight. Oh and they also congress for hundred of millions of dollars more in funding so they can pay workers overtime.

The head of the TSA's response last weekend to the problem was to say "We will not compromise on security." The translation of whch is- "tough shit American people, there will be no progress, ever, your travel experience will be maximally miserable and you just need to accept that."

Houston international airport cut average wait times by three.

Before about a third of the waiting lines where occupied with personal, typical oversea flight wait times was 1:20hrs. For domestic and foreign lines. The idea was to limit domestic lines also, so that the demand for personal will be heard in Washington.

The extortion scheme worked, now with new personal the waiting lines are occupied 50-70% on oversea flights and the waiting times got down to 20min. For both domestic and foreign lines.

Gatwick does a similar thing, but has opted to use 'anonymous' face recognition with a whole array of cameras [1]. By all accounts it's worked reasonably well, but this is coming from the manufacturer and/or Gatwick itself, so, to take with a large pinch of salt...

1. https://www.hrsid.com/case-study-gatwick-mflow-passenger-ver...

I went through security at Gatwick yesterday, and it was mostly good:

- short wait time

- a large dedicated area for transferring items from trays into your bag/pockets

- a whiteboard for leaving comments

- polite and jovial service people

The only bit I didn't like: there were multiple queues, and they looked messy to the extent that you couldn't tell which queue was shortest. Luckily there was no need to worry, as all queues moved quickly.

My experience at SFO a couple of weeks ago was the opposite of all the above.

SFO is terrible. My girlfriend and I were forced to go through it on our way to Taipei in October. Rude and discourteous TSA staff. One even shouted "This is America. You have to take your shoes off!"

FWIW, SFO uses a private contractor to conduct security in lieu of TSA. I've noticed that they do not have the "TSA" shoulder marks on their uniforms that actual TSA have at other airports. Presumably SFO hired them because they were better than TSA in some respect, if that tells you anything. :)

It looks like several airports that were contracting them have since switched to another contractor, though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_Aviation_Security#For...

And.... yet, 2 flights in the last few years, I explicitly did not have to take off shoes/belts, and the TSA agents were rather annoyed that we didn't somehow intuitively know this.

I've literally flown from LGW a hundred times and they are by far the best UK airport.

Waiting time is consistently short in my experience, staff is polite (and the white boards for feedback are a kind plus... can you honestly imagine this in any TSA-operated airport?).

The only changes I'd make are: add a "quiet" area before the gates and more drinkable water fountains.

Really interesting to realize that every day we see "on-demand" companies get funding but very little "on-demand" analytics tools to anticipate the workload. I had worked on a project for SNCF - French national railway company - to use Beacon to better track customers in railway stations and adapt the staff and services. We did the job but soon realized they absolute no clue about who does what, the time it takes, etc.

Like this? http://blipsystems.com/netherlands-railways-leverages-bliptr...

yep, exactly the same project

I've been told that they changed the structure (and this may explain the optimisation), but back when I was going regularly to Geneva, the security conveyors were just 2, narrow and really small. It was a joke of a system, and no doubt they could wait times in half: it was horrible to start with, specially for a decently sized airport like Geneva.

"This" airport has a name, it's "Geneva Airport".

Stop with the link bait headlines.

This article[1], from what looks like a trade publication, is simple, factual, and to the point.

1. http://airportfocusinternational.com/geneva-improves-securit...

Actual article headline: "Genève Aéroport Cuts Wait Times by Half".

Thanks, we reverted the submission title to the article's.

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