Justin Fox, Columnist

How PreCheck Made Airport Security Lines Longer

TSA shifted lots of resources to an expedited screening program that too few travelers use.

May 27, 2016 at 5:37 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Thousands standing around.
Photographer: Paul J. Richards/AFP/getty images

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The three main explanations making the rounds for why airport security waits have gotten out of control in the U.S. this spring have been:

There is surely something to all three of these, and it’s easy to find statistical evidence for the first two. After a long recession-induced slump, the number of U.S. air travelers set a monthly record of 75.6 million last July (the previous high was in July 2007), according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and passenger traffic may break that record again this summer. Meanwhile, the number of security screeners, measured once a year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fell from 47,200 in 2012 to 41,820 in May 2015.