Baggage Reclaim

Is an example of a broken – or indeed never created – social structure, and an illustration of the “tragedy of the commons”.    The usual process for reclaiming one’s hold baggage after a flight is that the baggage handlers bring it to the baggage reclaim hall, where it is put on a long, narrow oval belt, suitcase by suitcase, for the passengers to retrieve.    I did experience a different technique on an internal Turkish flight, where they just unloaded it all onto the tarmac by the plane, and let the passengers wander around it until they found their bag, but this is uncommon.  

A couple of hundred passengers waiting for their luggage, and for any one traveller, it makes sense for them to stand right next to the belt, where they can see their suitcase easily as soon as it appears,  grab it as it goes past, and (they hope) remove it from the belt ready to continue their journey.   However, what makes sense for one person fails to work well for the collective.   Passengers stand next to the belt, which means that those who are not next to the belt can neither see their luggage easily when it appears, nor retrieve it when they do spot it.   So they stand close behind those next to the belt, two or three deep, which means that those who are next to the belt, when they do grab their suitcase, cannot remove it because they are fenced in with people next to them and behind them.     Add to the mix the expectation ( usually false, but always there) that the airline has decided to send your luggage to Timbuctoo or simply failed to load it on the aircraft in the first place, and you have a recipe for a very uncomfortable social situation.  It’s amazing that it nearly always works out, somehow, and people end up with their suitcases, usually without too much delay.

The obvious, collective answer would be for people to stand 1 or 2 metres away from the belt,  allowing plenty of room for those who have spotted their suitcase to walk forward, and easily remove the suitcase from the belt, also providing much more space for people to see what was going past.   Why doesn’t this happen?   Is it just because it makes sense for the individual traveller to be right next to the belt?  Perhaps it’s because air travel is still a relatively infrequent experience for nearly everyone, so there is little opportunity for a social convention to develop?     

When waiting for buses, particularly in the UK, the social convention is to form an orderly queue, and get on the bus in turn, even though it might be better for an individual traveller to just rush to the front.  It’s a similar situation, and perhaps the fact that bus travel is an everyday experience for many – so much so that others in the queue may be acquaintances – makes the difference.   The combination of the rarity of the air travel experience and the fact that one will probably never see any of one’s fellow air travellers again may make the difference.    Or is it to do with early socialisation?  Mum explains to her children how to behave in a bus queue, but it doesn’t happen for baggage reclaim.