Did Sprawl Cause The Long TSA Lines In Houston?
Not exactly. But a lot of low-paid airport service workers around the U.S. must drive long distances, pay to park in remote lots, and take shuttles to get to work. It's one reason for high turnover.
A TSA security line at Bush Airport in Houston.
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The other day my wife and her sister had the misfortune of having to fly out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH), which over the last month has become notorious as the absolutely worst airport in the country to try to go through a security screening. They made their flight – but only snaking forward in the TSA security line for three hours. Fortunately, once they got past security, their flight was delayed, so they had plenty of time.
There are a lot of reasons why IAH in particular has been the worst experience in the country. The airport has an unusually decentralized system of security lines (in contrast to Atlanta, which has a centralized system). IAH is in the middle of several major construction projects that had already limited access to TSA lines that are ordinarily open. It’s also weird combination of major hub (United), international gateway, and entry point for occasional travelers (who take longer at security), which tends to gum up the works.
But there’s another reason IAH is a problem: It’s a long way from where most people live – especially low-wage workers who work at airports – and Houston is an unusually sprawling metropolis.
In other words, at least part of the reason TSA lines are long at IAH is because of sprawl.
Does Sprawl Really Cause Long Lines?
To be fair, there is one neighborhood close to IAH that has excellent bus service to the airport: the Greenpoint neighborhood. But Greenpoint is flood-prone and has gone downhill as a desirable place to live over the past decade or two, so it’s likely that airport workers are not choosing to live there.
And this is part of a bigger problem not only for security screeners but also for most airport service workers, who have to deal with relatively low pay. (TSA workers make around $20 an hour.)
Airports are enormous job centers. About 60,000 people work at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, 50,000 at LAX, and 35,000-40,000 at IAH, JFK in New York, and O’Hare in Chicago. But getting to work for these folks isn’t easy.
Parking at the Atlanta Airport
Airports are often either in the middle of nowhere (Houston, Denver), in areas with no housing (Las Vegas), or in locations where housing is extremely expensive (Los Angeles, San Francisco, both airports in DC). With a few exceptions (Reagan, O’Hare, SFO) airports are not well served by public transit. That means most low-wage workers must drive long distances to get to their job, often pay to park, and frequently take a shuttle from the parking lot to the airport itself. And even if public transit is available, airport workers often work weird hours, making public transit ridership impossible in some cases. (In Atlanta, perhaps the busiest airport in the country, MARTA shuts down its trains between 1 and 5 a.m.) And many public transit agencies are on the verge of bankruptcy, likely leading to further service cuts.
All of which leads to a lot of frustration among airport workers and high turnover, even when they are getting paid. At many major airports, turnover among TSA security screeners is, literally 100% per year or more (200% at Logan Airport in Boston).
It is beyond even my expansive notion of how we should reshape cities to say that policymakers should begin undertaking a major effort to engage in AOD (airport-oriented development, especially housing). But the TSA debacle makes it clear that something has to change so that people who work at airports can get there more easily.
Let’s Start Thinking Of Airports As Job Centers
The first change is probably simply cultural: We have to start thinking of airports as job centers.
Most policymakers view airports through the lens of air travelers. This is fair enough, because an airport is a critical piece of economic infrastructure for every region that’s got one. The purpose of an airport is to move travelers in and out of the region. But when it comes to travel to and from the airport itself, this is a limited point of view.
As policymakers, we think a lot about how air travelers get to and from airports. But air travelers are more affluent than most people. They have lots of options and are probably more willing to, say, take an expensive Uber ride than other folks. Hence many airport experts discount public transit as an option, making the argument – probably accurate – than most air travelers won’t use it.
But unlike air travelers, airport service workers are not well paid. In that sense, an airport is not unlike an affluent neighborhood. The customers are well off, but the people serving them are not, including TSA security screeners. So an airport is a kind of a 15-minute city for travelers, but the people who make it go probably have to travel an hour or so to get there – and pay to park and take a shuttle to get to work.
Parking at light rail station on the route to the Denver Airport.
Some major airports do try to promote vanpooling or other ride-sharing methods, which work for people who travel long distances and live near each other. But it’s hard for airport workers who work odd hours. And we frequently see plans for very expensive transit investments that never materialize or don’t work out they way they should. Denver has excellent light-rail service from downtown to the airport but it’s slow (the airport is 25 miles away) and only 17% of airport workers take transit. (Also, the stations near the airport have not had transit-oriented development as expected – at least not yet – and appear to serve mostly as remote parking lots for both workers and travelers, which is not the worst thing in the world.)
Most major airports now have transit connections, including SFO, Seattle, Portland, DFW, LAX, Dulles, and others. (I recently traveled from Dulles to Arlington on the Silver Line and it was quite good.) One frustration here in San Diego is that SANDAG, the regional planning agency, has proposed a series of expensive rail connections to the airport (where the runway is literally adjacent to a light-rail line) but nothing has happened.
Yet sometimes the simplest connections can make the most difference for the service workers at the airport. True,
