Yawning Bread. 27 July 2008

Of airports, nudity and an insult to men

    

  

 

Credit should be given where credit is due. Singapore's Changi Airport, of which the Terminal 3 has just had its official opening, is a very good airport.


Changi's Terminal 3. Free internet access, children's playground, plentiful seats.
      

However, I am not a jetsetter by any means and I will not pretend to be able to make comparisons with other major air hubs. I'm just basing my view on a purely subjective list of dissatisfactions, which in the case of Changi is very short. The only comparisons I think I'm qualified to make are with Schiphol in Amsterdam and Suvarnabhumi in Bangkok, air hubs that I have visited repeatedly over the last few years (most other places, one visits just once in a long while). My list is longer for the both of them, especially Suvarnabhumi, the newest of the three.

I rather like Schiphol. It's an efficient, well-signaged place. I believe it was the airport that originated the concept of plentiful shopping, dining and facilities, and that is still true today. However, where once it might have been impressively large and its facilities varied, today, it looks smallish by comparison. Yet it handles an enormous amount of traffic. Its nearly 50 million passengers a year exceeds the traffic that passes through Changi (35 million) or Suvarnabhumi (40 million) and so at peak hours, Schiphol feels uncomfortably congested. Worst are the long queues at passport control and security gates; you sometimes have to allow 30-40 minutes from joining the queue to coming out of it.

 

The queues at Suvarnabhumi are almost as bad at busy periods. The chief difference is that the Thai airport actually has more passport desks than Schiphol, but for some reason, I have never seen more than 60% of them in use. The Thai authorities seem to think that queues 30 persons long (meaning 20 – 30 minutes' wait) are nothing to be concerned about. No additional passport desks need to be opened.

Other items on my longish list of grouses about Suvarnabhumi include the lack of seats in the terminal. If you check in early, you find yourself on your feet wandering about until you reach the boarding gate. There, you get a seat, but there's nothing to do, nothing to see, while waiting.


No end of brand name boutiques and nowhere to rest your bum at Suvarnabhumi, unless you're prepared to sit on a bar stool for a S$40 meal.

 
What I appreciate about Changi is that it has plenty of seats around the place. Together with lots of free internet terminals, you can use your waiting time checking email or surfing for information about your destination. At Schiphol, you have to pay to use the internet. At Suvarnabhumi, I have yet to find any internet at all.

Another difference between Changi and Suvarnabhumi lies in the shopping. Not that I ever do any shopping myself, but Suvarnabhumi seems stuck in the thinking that air travel is for the rich. Too many of the shops are high-end brand names, making me feel like an unwelcome pauper. Too many of the food outlets boast S$40 meals when all I want is a quick bite. In contrast, Changi, like Schiphol, appears to be making an effort to cater to the typical traveller, and we're beginning to see affordable grocery or luggage shops, sushi bars and even fast food.

But Suvarnabhumi's starkest failing is its taxi mess. That deserves a dissertation by itself. See box at right.

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Suvarnabhumi's taxi oversight

The taxi systems at Changi and Suvarnabhumi offer the greatest contrast. At the former, it's super-efficient. At the latter, it's a mess. The reason for that is almost unbelievable – Suvarnabhumi's main terminal, as originally designed, was not supposed to have a taxi rank!

What the plans provided was a satellite building about 2 km away known as a Transport Center. There was supposed to be a shuttle service between the main terminal and the Transport Center, and passengers were expected to transfer to the latter from where they could choose from among, city and long-distance buses.

It wasn't until everything had been built before the government finally came to its senses realising that the extra inconvenience of shuttling to the Transport Center would totally put people off. And so a make-shift taxi stand – and only one, to serve the entire airport – was set up outside the main building. (To get an idea of the crowding, imagine passengers from all 4 terminals of Changi having to converge at a single taxi stand.)

Dealing with the problem only when Suvarnabhumi was ready to open also meant that there was very little apron space for taxi queues, which snakes into the main building blocking other people's paths. Meanwhile on the driveway, taxis queuing up for passengers conflict with private cars. A large number of traffic wardens are required to keep order, with frequent shrill blowing of whistles.

In attempting to find a location for a taxi queue that generates the least conflict with other passengers and cars, the make-shift taxi stand has been moved at least three times in the last 18 months. And it's still a mess.

 

Security checks are where bottlenecks tend to occur, even at Changi. To speed things a little, new technology, in the form of a millimetre-wave scanner, is now being deployed. Terminal 3 has the first of Changi's "body scanners".


Diagrammatic view of a millimetre-wave scanner
  

The US' Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has a webpage explaining how it works. As you can see, the millimetre-wave bounces off skin, producing a 3-dimensional image of your naked body. Anything that has been tucked between your opaque clothing and your skin is thus picked up by the scanner.

There have been objections about invasion of privacy. Passengers are being used as unwilling subjects of "airport porn", it is alleged. 

"This is nothing more than a virtual strip search," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty program for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. "I don't think most passengers are aware that the images being viewed of them show so much. It's a sad commentary that we feel the need to look at borderline pornographic images to feel safe." 

Andy Ho of the Straits Times has been moved to write a full-page article weighing the invasiveness of this search technology against more traditional methods like pat-downs and cavity searches (Straits Times, 26 July 2008, Changi's new scanner a reasonable search).


Images from the body scanner that the operator sees

 
I don't know about you, but personally, I find all this worry quite funny. The majority probably agrees too. In trial runs at US airports, over 90% of passengers who were asked if they would agree to be body-scanned, said yes.

"If they're going to touch you anyway, why not give them a peek?" quipped Celia Haywoode, 76, of Toronto, who was interviewed at a US airport where the trial was in progress. "At my age, I'm honored someone's willing to look." 


Test images from a millimetre-wave scanner, showing how Glock 17 handguns can be picked up. You can also see the man's wallet in his rear pocket, and keys in his front pocket
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The objectors, while vocal, seem to be a minority. There is this group of people who have big hang-ups about nudity and exposure, associating it with threat to their person and collapse of a proper civilised order.

Increasingly, these people will be the dinosaurs of the modern age. Technological advances will mean that more and more private information will become available, not least of which will be images of ourselves as we walk down a video-monitored street or pass through an airport. It's one thing to worry about protecting information that can be real threats, e.g. access to our bank accounts, it's another thing to get paranoid about nudity.

Anthropologically speaking, societies have functioned without people having to wear clothes. And any gay man who has been to a nude orgy will tell you having lots of nude people around you is ultimately quite a blah affair.

It's all in the mind. When you are brought up to think that nudity and sex is shocking and a great threat to yourself and society, yes, you'll be uptight about it. But thankfully, most people on this earth aren't as neurotic as that.

The right response to invasive scanning technology isn't to ban it, but for the neurotic few among us to get over it.

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Still, airport authorities go some way to address their concerns. They (and Changi included) have promised to use software to blur or mask the face on the images produced. Secondly, the officer looking at the images will be located in a separate room some distance away from the scanning machine and the queue, making it impossible for the operator to connect the images with sight of the real person. Thirdly, the images will not be saved.

But Changi boasted about an additional safeguard which I thought insulting. They said that only female officers were allowed to watch the screens. This is the kind of sexism that sticks in my craw, for contained within is the assumption that men are predatory and women are not. This is prejudice pure and simple. It is also job discrimination.

It's just typical of Singapore that unexamined biases corrupt policy decisions. We talk a lot about the value of critical thinking, but every now and then we fail at it, even at the highest levels. This handicaps us when faced with new technology, which often presents social and ethical challenges. Disallowing men to be scanners is an example of how we have failed to think clearly to avoid ingrained and kneejerk responses, and how we have failed to prioritise and respect basic civil rights, including gender equality, in our rush to appease sex-phobic ultra-conservatives who alas, number among the civil servants themselves.

© Yawning Bread 

 

 

 

Another area where similar sexism that disadvantages men occurs is in our alimony laws.

When a high-income man divorces his lower-earning wife, he has to pay her alimony. But the reverse does not apply. Singapore law treats alimony as something only men pay their wives, not the other way around, however wealthy had income-rich the woman is.

 

 

Footnotes

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