Completely agree. The only one on this list that upsets me is Clear.
It's such a transparent abuse of government power that it makes my blood boil. Airports are funded through my tax dollars and TSA is as you said mandated by the government. There is limited space and resources in the airport so allowing a private company to take up some of that space and what's more turn a profit from it is peak Rent-seeking behavior and anyone in government who allowed this to happen should be run out of office.
Not really, or at least not in the same sense/degree as stuff like highways and roads. For example, my nearest major airport boasts:
> Airports are supported by the users of the airport and the fees, rents, or leases in place with airlines, tenants, and travelers. The bottom line for local taxpayers is “if you don’t use the airport, you’re not paying for the airport.”
Agreed. And to make it worse, Clear speeds up the id checking phase of airport security, but that has never been the chokepoint in my experience (it's instead the xray scanner).
Nope, the real benefit of Clear is that once you are past the id check, you waltz past most of the line for the scanner. I suppose that depends on the airport but that's how it works wherever I've been.
If your local airport is incredibly congested, Clear goes from a nice to have to a huge timesaver.
Oh, I agree that Clear is worth using since you get to skip the id line. My point is that Clear isn't making the process any more efficient - they instead created a "skip the line" option under the guise of "technology".
And the tech doesn’t even work that well! Half the time I end up pulling out my ID. They also erased my account this summer in a “system upgrade.” I pictured some poor DBA getting chewed out for deleting thousands of rows by mistake.
It's such a transparent abuse of government power that it makes my blood boil. Airports are funded through my tax dollars and TSA is as you said mandated by the government. There is limited space and resources in the airport so allowing a private company to take up some of that space and what's more turn a profit from it is peak Rent-seeking behavior and anyone in government who allowed this to happen should be run out of office.