Imagethief has once again found himself commuting between Beijing and Shanghai. This is always an ordeal, and not just because Air China economy class seats ruin my lower back. Last night I arrived at Hongqiao Airport at 730PM to find the taxi line at it's serpentine worst. It ran through all six switchbacks and curled around to the Kentucky Fried Chicken in front of the terminal. It took me an hour to get from the airplane to a taxi, of which ten minutes was walking to the baggage claim and waiting for my bag, and the rest was crawling through the taxi queue in a haze of second-hand smoke while enormo-roaches from the drains ran around my ankles. It was as every bit as much fun as using a nailgun to drive six-inch zinc spikes through my toes.

The problem at Hongqiao is one of design, not scarcity. If a market-maker is any entity that matches willing buyers with willing sellers, Hongqiao is the shittiest possible market maker. It has a ready supply of willing taxi passengers and, generally, an equally ready supply of willing taxis. But it fails utterly to bring these two groups with any kind of efficienty, all but guaranteering that everyone has to wait. (Yes, I know it's also bringing together captive buyers with a virtual ground transportation monopoly, but work with me here.)

The problem is that while taxis arrive essentially nonstop, there is a single area of embarkation. At one point I counted thirty taxis waiting in the ranks, but only six of them could load. It took a good sixty seconds to cycle each group of six taxis through. This choke point serves the entire airport, with exactly the result you would expect. Everyone waits. I once waited for an hour and then got a taxi driver who complained bitterly that he had waited for two hours and I was too small a fare to justify his wait. I was not overly sympathetic, but if we're both there and both waiting, then, not to put too fine a point on it, the system is fucked.

That's why the pirate taxis at Hongqiao always use the same pitch: "Hey, mister! Taxi-no-waiting!" Spectacular, as long as you don't mind paying quadruple over a metered trip and re-bargaining at the halfway point. The bottleneck for legit taxis is so well designed to keep the pirate taxis in business that you'd think the airport administration was taking a tax-free cut off the top.

Even Beijing Capital International Airport, which was --trust me on this if you've not been there-- not designed by geniuses, has worked this one out. It now has about six different taxi qeues, any one of which can board several people simultaneously. I rarely wait longer than ten minutes (although I still get the secondhand smoke). It's disorderly and inelegant, and the sheer volume of useless yellow pamphlets handed out by the taxi wranglers there has probably resulted in the deforestation of half of Indonesia, but it works.

So here is my mandate to Hongqiao Airport: Solve the taxi bottleneck. Open up multiple queues and redesign the boarding areas. Domestic Chinese air travel is brutal and unreliable enough without having to endure enturely unnecessary taxi purgatory upon arrival. After all, passenger numbers keep rising, and sooner or later it might even be worth flying to remote Pudong instead and taking the super-train to nowhere.

I realize that Hongqiao isn't really competing for my business in the normal sense of the word, and doesn't have much incentive to improve the experience for travellers, so I'll hit it with the only trump card I have: Does Hongqiao want all those passengers who will arrive for Expo 2010 to think Shanghai is some kind of hick town?

I didn't think so.