December was spent travelling, which meant going through airport security. Bristol airport used to be a breeze – no queues at security, but over the last year, this has drastically changed. This time round, queues were the worst that I’ve experienced; to the point that I paid to go through the express queue. Dublin airport, on the other hand, was a breeze. For many years I passed through the chaos of Dublin airport at peak time [which is about 5am]; the queues were long but they moved fast, so although my last trip may not have experienced it at its worst, there did appear to be something different. Dublin airport reported almost 22 million passengers in 2014 [Dublin airport website] whereas Bristol airport has reported just under 6 million passengers for the first 11 months of the year [Bristol airport website]. Dublin airport has two security areas (one in each terminal) and about three quarters of a million transiting passengers. Taking this into consideration, at least one of the two security screening areas in Dublin sees more passengers than Bristol (if not both).
The two very different experiences of this led me to think about the design of the security areas. Being the curious sort, I looked up the recommended layout for security areas – and found the US TSA (Transport Security Agency) recommendations [TSA airport security design guidelines]. Interestingly there was much discussion about along room for people to repack their items after passing through the security checkpoint, but only passing reference to the space before the checkpoint. To me, this seemed to be the major difference between Bristol and Dublin airport. Dublin airport has generous space prior to the security conveyor belt so that passengers can prepare their bags whilst still in the queue, Bristol airport has limited space, so that only the first two passengers in the queue can unload the relevant items from their bags with ease.
Being a statistician, I thought about whether anyone has formally done any experiments on optimal design of the security screening area for improved throughput of passengers. Within a constrained space, is it better to allow more space before or after the metal detector?
Ideally, we would create a formal setup that could be varied so that we could have a number of different layouts within the same airport; but this is not the most practical. Therefore a more pragmatic route would be to look at countries with many airports with the same security specifications that have a variety of designs. Then we could compare the passenger throughout at peak times at the different airports [taking, of course, information such as the number of lanes open; if there are dedicated “slow movers” (wheelchairs and buggies) lanes and number of security personnel per lane into account].
If this design layout was then adopted, then it would make a life less stressful. It also makes me wonder if anything has used a scientific experimental approach when design interior layouts?
To be decided 