It’s the holiday season, which means more and more people will be flying in the next couple of weeks. The TSA screened 20.9 million people during the 10-day travel period around Thanksgiving, which is 89% of the levels recorded before the pandemic, according to TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein. There’s no question Americans will be flying just as much, if not more, for the upcoming Christmas-to-New-Year holiday season.
Lots of travelers at the airport means lots of lines at the TSA checkpoint. Hopefully you have some way to not have to stay in the regular queue; perhaps you have TSA PreCheck or CLEAR. Hopefully both. Either way, if human nature is on your side, there’s a way to easily most likely find the queue that’s the shortest.
Go to the left.
Study after study has shown when humans have a choice of direction, they tend to go to the right. Stores take advantage of this. Theme parks are aware of it. I remember when Joe and I used to go to Walt Disney World a lot, we used to voraciously read Birnbaum’s unofficial guide to WDW (Stephen Birnbaum died of leukemia in 1991, but an updated version of his book is still released every year). Our mantra for queues at the parks was always, “Birnbaum says to go left.”
Why do people naturally go right? Probably because 90% of us are right-handed. It’s the subconscious “better” side so that’s the way we tend to go if given a choice and don’t think about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if left-handed people tend to go left…but they’re only 10% of the population.
Anyway, when you’ve arrived at the airport and are trying to find the shortest queue at the TSA checkpoint, go to the left, usually as far to the left as you can – there’s a better chance you’ll find a queue that’s a little shorter.
Feature Photo (cropped): Oatsy40 / Wikimedia
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