I've travelled quite a bit via Southwest, and I've never found its boarding process to have wasted my time. However, it seems to waste the time of the 85% of passengers who begin lining up in one of the three corrals about an hour before flight time. My favorite maneuver is to arrive at the gate 15 minutes before flight time and enter through the "A" corral just as it is emptying, while all the schmoes in "B" and "C" who have been there an hour stand there. Of course it is a _bit_ inconvenient to be online with printer access exactly 24 hours before flight time to get an "A" ticket, but the bargain turns out to be worth it.

The word I use is "corral" because the preflight behavior of Southwest passengers is best described as bovine. "They treat us like cattle, so we act like cattle": nervous, suspicious, obtuse, exposed, perched on a psychological precipe between stolidity and mania, and obsessed with one's relation to the group and to the boundary. Efficiency and my own coping mechanisms aside, I'd rather travel on an airline without such dehumanizing operating procedures.

One such airline is JetBlue, which not only puts the best (i.e. most legroom) seats in the back, but in its Long Beach hub actually loads from both ends of the plane. It's worth the inconvenient drive down to Long Beach to travel the remainder of the journey with such civility. Civility requires assigned seats, it seems to me.

I think much of the problem with airplane loading, which doesn't obtain in train loading, is that the front seats are perceived as being so much "better" than the back. As JetBlue's example shows, airlines could do something about this. On the other hand, there's probably nothing to be done about the suckage of the middle seat.