End of the line: it’s time to rethink the queue

Flying to Kalamata this week, I did my own little bit to reduce the terrible queues at Heathrow Terminal 5. Heroically, I stacked up the grey luggage trays once they’d been emptied by passengers coming through security.

As a result, there were more loaded trays for people to pick up, and a smaller tailback of passengers — including me — waiting to pick up their unloaded trays. It was just a tiny example of the hundreds of things that could be done to reduce queues in airports, hospitals, train stations, supermarkets…

The British may be famous for their patient queueing but it doesn’t mean we actually like doing it. So why hasn’t more been done to eradicate queues?

We can travel around the world faster than ever. Medicine makes even more miraculous advances. One of the joyful aspects of Amazon is that it removes the need to queue in shops. This week, Aldi announced new, checkout-free, queue-free supermarkets. Hooray! And yet the eternal queue remains unreformed and undisrupted elsewhere.

Take my trip to Kalamata. My plane to Greece was on time — it took only three hours and 50 minutes to travel 1,500 miles from Heathrow to Kalamata Airport. But because of all that queueing at Heathrow, it also happened to take me exactly the same amount of time — three hours and 50 minutes — to get the 17 miles from my north London flat to my seat in the plane. Thanks to queues, I was moving nearly 100 times more slowly on the ground than in the air.

Once Heathrow has sorted out someone to pile up the grey trays at security, it’s time to set up a single queue to do everything at the airport.