JAMES L. MARTIN Sending your baggage ahead proposed

The longer I'm around, the more I'm impressed by the genius of American entrepreneurs.
Consider Richard Altomare, president and CEO of a Florida-based company called Universal Express. Altomare recently published an open letter to Congress inviting attention to an idea that would improve airline security while eliminating some of the unpleasantness and inconvenience associated with baggage screening. The idea: Enable passengers to affordably ship their bags ahead of time to their final destination.
Do this, and you create a lot of magic. In addition to better protecting and serving airline passengers, you help restore financial health to the airline industry, create jobs and reduce the costs to taxpayers of the Transportation Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security. It's a win-win proposition.
New procedures
If you've been to an airport lately, you know passengers face more time in the ticket, baggage check and carousel lines and significantly more hassle getting through the security checkpoints. For senior citizens and the handicapped, who account for 40 million passengers a year, the added difficulties are especially stressful. It doesn't take much of a glitch, especially during the crowded holiday season, to mess up the whole system.
Airports today are a brave new world. They present a gamut of new, ever-changing security procedures that affect both your baggage and body.
The bothersome and invasive new procedures are the price we pay for safety in the post-9/11 world. But added time in airports does beg a question: "Isn't there a better way?" Does "TSA" really stand for "thousands standing around," as muses Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Aviation?
Enter the "can-do" spirit of the U.S. private sector.
I first encountered Altomare, a fellow former Marine passionately inbred with the corps' "can-do" spirit, when he was in Washington recently distributing his ideas for eliminating time-consuming and bothersome baggage searches at airports.
How it works
The process would work like this: Luggage Express, a subsidiary of Altomare's Universal Express, would come to your home or workplace, pick up your bags and transport them to your final destination. They would employ the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, FedEx, Airborne Express -- and perhaps an eventual new carrier that would rise to meet the need -- to move the baggage from point A to point B.
Luggage Express already performs such services for certain high-end customers. They insure everything. And after a decade of experience, they have not lost any baggage -- not a single bag! By leveraging the buying power of their customers -- in effect, a volume discount -- they could get better prices than you or I could obtain on our own.
Altomare's proposal is to encourage more passengers to send their bags ahead of time. Give passengers a framework of choices where it would be less expensive to plan ahead, more expensive to take your bags to the airport. Planning ahead would eliminate the physical effort of lugging bags around, which would be especially helpful to senior citizens. It would also reduce the need for tips to taxi drivers and porters.
Cost effects
Altomare argues that widespread use of such a system would result in reasonable baggage shipping prices all could afford, probably in the $20-to-$30 range. Because this would increase efficiency in the airline industry, it would likely produce lower ticket prices. And it would certainly reduce the hidden costs of the TSA bureaucracy. Common sense alone suggests fewer bags in the airport will lower security risks and costs.
The catch is that most of today's passengers think their bags fly free. The airlines are carrying more than twice as many bags as passengers. But everything has costs, and as a practical matter, the one-day business traveler routinely subsidizes baggage handling and screening just as the business traveler subsidizes all other airline costs. And we, as consumers, eventually pay for this.
U.S. airlines carry 640 million passengers a year. Asking them to change their thinking and travel habits is no small deal. But compared to the other changes we've had to cope with since Sept. 11, 2001, Altomare's suggestion makes sense. Airline industry officials and policy-makers and political leaders in Washington should give the idea their serious consideration.
At the very least, it is a helpful suggestion -- one that would be especially helpful to America's senior citizens.
XJames L. Martin is president of the 60 Plus Association, a senior citizen advocacy group. Neither Martin nor 60 Plus has a financial interest in Universal Express. Readers may write to him at: 60 Plus, 1600 Wilson Blvd., Suite 960, Arlington, Va. 22209; Web site: www.60plus.org.