This little bit from David Weinberger comes right after I read an interview with a Lufthansa exec who is quite pleased that the overall time in the airport hasn’t increased much: Time gone to more intensive security checks was saved elsewhere. If you read David’s observation, you see room for improvement.
When you check in for a flight by going to a counter staffed by a live human being, the human does a prodigious amount of typing and the whole process takes longer than if you used one of them new-fangled automated check-in kiosks.
So why don’t they just put one of those kiosks behind the counter for the check-in people to use?