I was wondering if it would be possible to setup an offsite Bus Station/Rail Station and even Automated People Mover station whereby passengers can checkin for their flight and their bags would be loaded onto the bus/train and passengers would pass through security at the off site station 3 hours before their flight. Once they arrive the bus parks in a secure area of the airport and passengers go directly to their gate.

For connecting passengers lets say your flight lands at SJC and you have an international flight out of SFO your bags would transfer with you on the bus and you would arrive airside as opposed to re clearing TSA as the bus would be secured with a TSA officer onboard or an outsourced security officer who doubles as the Customer Service rep.

The same could go for Trains/Automated People Movers you could check in at an offsite station and clear TSA security and all of your bags would be automatically put on your flight.

When the bus arrives on the airport grounds and passes through the gate it is checked with a manifest and a sticker is placed on the Boarding Pass with the words"Off site TSA Cleared Agent#". If there are any questions a TSA officer would ask those passengers to step off the bus for a check and board the TSA Security Bus to the terminal.

This solution could help alleviate the extra cars/passengers at the airport. Perhaps the airline could make an incentive such as for passengers who wish to use the offsite location their bags would be $15 instead of $25 or the first bag free.

So lets say I live in the South Bay the Light Rail could take people to the offsite location by SJC and I would checkin for my flight there and there would be frequent buses going to and from the airport. One could park their car in a secured garage for $12 per day and once you are checked in at this facility you would arrive airside sort of like the offsite checkin center at the PHX Sky Harbor Rental Car Center except TSA would have security there.

When you arrive from overseas you could have the option to take the Customs Bus marked" Off Site" SJC and clear customs at the offiste center and then go directly to your car, light rail or Train. Offsite SFO and you would clear customs at the SFO Off Site Center or Off Site OAK and clear customs at OAK. This could help alleviate the Customs line at the main airport(you would still have that option but would be advised if the waits are long). If the offsite center customs is at capacity then passengers would be directed at random to the Offiste. If you parked your car at this offiste facility you would have priority over those who are having someone pick them up to clear customs at the offsite facility if the airport is clogged. Uber/Lyft would operate only to this facility as would other off-site transportation. the main airport as the offsite facility is to encourage the use of public transportation, shared rides/taxis. Personal vehicles not parking at the offiste facility will be asked to go directly to the airport using regular checking etc.

If you as a passenger want to avail of the offsite facility with a personal car you can do so but would be asked to park for $2 an hour in the garage or $1 for dropoffs of up to 15 minutes. Overnight parking would be $12 per day.

This offsite Customs could clear up the lines at SFO and you could clear it close to where you live . Of course there would still be the option to do it at the airport but to get people to use the Off site Clearance customers would be treated to $12 per day parking ,easier access to the checkin counters, less walking(as customs/Immigration would be right there after getting off the bus and your luggage would be there within a few minutes.

Luggage cart from the flights would head directly to the Buses waiting(so you may wait a few minutes) but the sorting would be less as it would be based upon the bus capacity. So what passengers would do is when they come off the plane they wait in the waiting area and your boarding pass is scanned and the last few letters of your lastname and First letter of your First Name and Destination you arrived from will appear on the screen after you check in with the bus agent to ensure your bags have been loaded onto the bus.

You would then be told to board Bus 4.(Buses would run often) to the offsite center. Connections to the other offsite center would also be frequent about 3-5 an hour and the wait time will be no more than 10 minutes or so.

When you arrived at the offsite center closest to you you will be presented with the Automated Passport Control. For those who can't use it they will be asked to sit and an officer will approach you and guide you through the process. There won't be any lines and you can sit until you are called.

Then you are taken to the baggage room and the baggage agent grabs you a cart and walks you to your bag and through Customs. If you have anything to delcare you are taken to a waiting room where you will sit until you are called.

This option will be more personalized. Premium Passengers who arrive at the Bus Center are taken upstairs to the lounge where you will wait until your assigned bus time which will leave 20 minutes before boarding. There would be an option for the night before checkin and security as there would be a hotel attached to the center in the secure area just for traveling customers.

Passengers on an early morning flight arrive the center between 4 PM and 10 PM the night before and are taken through security. They are asked to leave their bags at their room door no later than 2 hours before their flight departs and their bags will be put onto the flight by porters(as guest will have their bags tagged at the hotel checkin counter the night before). There would be a continental breakfast served as well starting at 3 AM. Passengers could then arrive at the gate 15 minutes before boarding as they would board the bus 5-10 minutes before. This way you can maximize your sleep as well.

For those on connecting flights passengers can go to the hotel and back to their early morning flight without re clearing security. Passengers with meetings can schedule meetings here at this hotel. If you are a non-traveler you would be added to the TSA Guest List and cleared through security.

The center will have basic dining or passengers can decide to go right to the airport. The bus will make three stops depending on where each gate is located and will be taken up to the lobby via elevators and escalators. There would be less walking from Security to the Gate/Customs as the Bus will stop within a range of 5-10 gates. Each terminal has its own dedicated bus. So depending on the size of the terminal your bus may make 2 stops or 3 to avoid too much walking . There would be buggies to take you to the gate if you want. You would end up arriving at your departure gate between 90 minutes - 20 minutes before boarding call(with 20 being the cutoff) depending on if you want to avail of the main airport or not. Airport to airport connections will require you to arrive no later than 90-120 minutes before departure depending on time of day,traffic,International or Domestic Flight. The airlines would book your flights using this service. Lets say you found a good deal from SJC-LAX and then SFO-CDG you would pay the $10 to connect. Or lets say you found a good deal from JFK-SFO(as there are nostop fligths) and had a colleague going with you from SJC-FRA on Lufthansa or vice versa you could use this service to save $$$ so paying $10 each way and arriving within the security area of the airport with guaranteed connections could give you great savings.

Yes Taxis may lose money but still there is a place for them for all those people who don't fly or don't want this service. Most tourist and locals alike would use such a service.

At the center you would sit in a lounge before security and a staffer would line you up by row. When your row is called you go through security. There would be lanes for Pre-Check, Families and Those who are frequent fliers but are not TSA Pre-Check and who know the drill so that way other TSA reps can be used to help infrequent travelers and families. Your wait would be no more than 5-10 minutes in line.

Most of the center would have Automated Checkin Kiosks and there would be very few counters as you would print off the bag tag after the kiosk agent verifies your ID they would enter their code into the machine. For those with ticketing issues there would be offices for that where passengers would sit down and outsourced agents would help them. This would save the airline money as most people using this center would have everything in order. Of course you could go the airport checkin if you really needed the full service.



People with special-needs will have a dedicated area to checkin/security/customs etc and have dedicated accessible buses.

What is your thoughts on this? When the TSA lines are full there will be signs before the airport directing you to this offsite facility. People dropping you off can park on the first floor for $1 per hour vs more at the airport.

This facility will have better access to and from the freeway and eliminate going round and round . Instead of the cellphone waiting lot the facility will replace it.

Another potential benefit to this center could be that if there are any doubts by the TSA those passengers would be screened far enough away from the main airport(and perhaps the TSA could require those with a higher security risk to check in at this center as they would then be escorted by the TSA bus to their gate and would be handed off by a TSA officer to the air crew). This would give them a secure area still with places such as coffee but is more closely monitored and at anytime if a doubt arises the passenger can be taken right away from the premises and the passenger simply cant just go to the g ate and board a plane as a bus has to be boarded before.

The Airport Passenger Fees would be used to subsidize the program or passengers could book the bus through their airline for $5-$10 but would save money over a Taxi or Uber connecting with the various airports and even going home as opposed to paying $90 from SJC- San Francisco Downtown passengers can pay $30 even with the $10 ride they would save $$$$.

Sounds like a bit from some of the worst set-ups I've seen while flying and then more to make it worse.

Even if there were a way to do it so as to not be so capital/investment intensive, not increase labor costs, not increase real estate-related costs, it shifts the bottleneck and makes worse a threat vector without delivering improved results in the main.

Getting government out of the airlines security operations would go a long ways to resolving long TSA lines.

You lost me at the "3 hours before flight".The rest was a diatribe about SJC, one of 1000's of airports in the US and by the sound of it, the only on the OP has ever transited or arrived/departed from/to....
OP- Serious question, do you even fly semi-regularly? Say 3-4 times per week? I didn't think so....

That suggestion won't fix anything and would only make a bigger mess.

There are 2 options to improve TSA lines:
- Require that TSA staff actually work and stop playing around on their phones, having personal conversations or otherwise staring into space on paid time. Get rid of BDOs and put them back on the line. Remove the TDCs, they serve no useful security purpose. Make the STSOs and LTSOs work. You can lead/supervise and screen at the same time.

or

- Disband TSA. Return airport screening to the airports and airlines using private contractors as was done before 9/11 and is done almost everywhere else on the planet.

In both options, get rid of the pointless and unneeded limits on liquids and forcing everyone to take off their shoes. Relegate body scanners to a secondary screening method at most. Walk through metal detectors, baggage xray, random ETD swabs and random patdowns are more then enough. Anything more then that is nothing more then pure insanity and paranoia.

I don't recall the airport, but recently someone posted a photo at AskTSA. One jammed line and four more closed, empty lanes, each leading to a podium with a TSA standing there doing nothing.

IIRC, the tweeter may even have referenced TSA's latest bit of ridiculous word-smithing: they're training ("How to Stand Around, 101"), or playing 'secret service mission' - or spending their break pretending to be a TDC.

OP, I think we need a more practical approach to security. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the rest of the world seems to do airport security without it turning into the national embarrassment it is in the US. They do it with half or less of the staff the US uses, a tiny fraction of the expensive (and often incorrect) signage, endlessly blaring recorded loops and big screens that the US wastes money on.

The rest of the world even manages to handle airport security effectively without blogs or twitter accounts dispensing misinformation and insults.

Best of all, in the rest of the world, agents are trained* to behave normally and use their 'indoor voices' instead of barking loudly.

* Either the rest of the world trains their agents to speak in a normal speaking voice inside, or they're smart enough to figure out there's no positive reason to stand around bellowing all day. People ignore barking; they pay attention to eye contact and quiet voices.

OP, your carefully thought out plan would succeed in enriching many corrupt government officials, contractors and politicians. I'm a taxpayer, and that money would come out of my pocket. I see nothing in your plan that would expedite my experience, reduce the likelihood of hands between my legs and in my clothing every time I fly, or that would reduce the noise pollution of barking TSOs and overly-loud taped loops. It would add an extra burden in the form of buses/trams/trains and a broken up journey. That's nothing to young, able-bodied travelers with minimal luggage; it's a real headache for families, less-than-able-bodied people, folks in wheelchairs/crutches, pax with lots of luggage, etc.

I scanned through the post. Essentially, it's a prime example of tl;dr. However, the sentence I quoted above caught my attention.

Seriously? How often do you fly? Do you realize that's a bunch of impractical nonsense?

Is OP perhaps speaking satirically? Is this a Modest Proposal?

Ha! You're right! When discussing TSA and its practices, ordinary measures of absurdity are inadequate.

Let's hope some ambitious FSD employee doesn't read OP's post and take it seriously.

..and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed.

I'm guessing you don't work in Logistics. Just a few problems:

* Airline operations and airport operations are relatively separate entities. What you're proposing requires buy in from all parties, while also forcing them to get into the ground transportation and hospitality business.

* Major cities generally have several forms of public transportation to/from airports. Buses, trains, etc. Creating an offsite center would require a city's mass transit agency to spend millions or billions to alter their transit routes -- in the case of trains, this also likely requires the taking of land through eminent domain proceedings in an effort to build new routes from city centers to offsite centers. Airports (airlines?) would then have to do the same to transport people from offsite centers to airports.

* Passengers might randomly disembark from their flights and get directed to offsite immigration and customs centers? Let's not even think about how their luggage gets sorted and sent to the right center, what happens if their car is parked at the airport or someone is waiting to pick them up or they have a tight connection from the same airport.

* You have a lot of instances where employees seem to be escorting people to places. (they will be asked to sit and an officer will approach you and guide you through the process. There won't be any lines and you can sit until you are called....their bags will be put onto the flight by porters...baggage agent grabs you a cart and walks you to your bag and through Customs.... a staffer would line you up by row. When your row is called you go through security. There would be lanes for Pre-Check, Families and Those who are frequent fliers but are not TSA Pre-Check and who know the drill so that way other TSA reps can be used to help infrequent travelers and families...For those with ticketing issues there would be offices for that where passengers would sit down and outsourced agents would help them). We all hate lines, but lines are efficient -- far more efficient than waiting for someone to escort/call/walk you from a waiting area to a desk where you're being helped.

Frankly, it sounds like a huge <redacted>.

Agreed, a tl;dr, but I saw something there about waiting up to ten minutes for a bus that would take you to security. I very rarely wait 10 minutes AT security.

All of these pesky lines would go away if people would just stop flying...

OP, you are describing a City Air Terminal. It typically only works in dense cities as it allows people to drop off their luggage in the city and get on a train to the airport. Due to traffic, the train is often faster during peak traffic times. Prime examples of this in action are HK, Singapore, Seoul, lesser extent Tokyo.

However, security is typically not handled at the CAT. Immigration/customs, perhaps.