Just you wait – the end of the line is in sight

Most of you probably lost some time last week waiting in line.

Maybe you were in a Boxing Day lineup, or in a supermarket queue or coffee shop latte line. Maybe you were stuck in traffic.

These little waits are aggravating, but they’re way worse when you know how much time we spend in them. According to queue experts, the average commuter wastes one to two years of their life in lineups.

I made a film about queues last year. I travelled the planet from India to England standing in lines, studying line behaviour and meeting line designers.

I came away hopeful we humans may soon get to the end of the line.

But how did we get in line to start with?

For most of history we stood in mobs, where the biggest guys got “priority.” It wasn’t first come, first served; it was worst come, first served.

But everything re-aligned during the French Revolution with the cry for liberty and equality. Suddenly, citizens demanded equal treatment in bread lines, so they invented the queue, where everyone got served in order. Gradually the practice spread around the world.

By the 1960s, a new science of queuing was re-designing the line.

By the ’70s, parallel lines appeared at banks and supermarkets, where you could choose your queue.

First we liked the idea, but gradually we became unhappy, as line designers discovered the first rule of queue behaviour: The other line always moves faster.

• Q-tip 1: The express lane often isn’t faster, according to experts. It’s not the huge cart of groceries that holds you up, it’s the number of people in line, fumbling for wallets, searching for credit cards, buying lottery tickets. So, choose the shortest line. • Q-tip 2: Bagging your groceries in the self-serve line may make time fly, but it’s slower. Professional baggers are 30 per cent faster than you.

There’s similar psychology in car lineups, where we weave back and forth, because the other lane looks faster. Road experts say all this weaving, braking and accelerating slows us all down.

In Queuetopia — Britain — people are crazy for queuing. Ask almost any Brit and they’ll tell you how proud they are to “queue up.” I joined England’s most famous queue at Wimbledon, where 10,000 people line up daily for several hours, for standing-room tickets. Many say they return every year, not for the tennis, but the camaraderie of the queue.

Sociologists told me the British are a reserved, class-conscious people who don’t talk easily to strangers, but lineups are one place they’re comfortable chatting. Wimbledon’s chief steward admitted they could easily put the 10,000 tickets online, but “people would miss the queue.”

So are lineups a fact of life we should learn to love?

Technology is making stunning progress in the taming of the queue.

Visit Apple’s jam-packed stores and you won’t see lines at the cash — because every sales clerk also is your cashier, using cellphone card-readers to zip you through. It won’t be long before most stores work like this and shop lines start to vanish.

Stores might vanish, too, if Amazon has its way. If you don’t want to stand in line, you’ll go online, as many Boxing Day shoppers did this week. New online apps let you order from Starbucks then pick up without lining up, so latte lines could disappear, too.

Even traffic lines will shrink fast, once self-driving cars become common. They’ll stay in one lane without weaving and move 120 km/h, centimetres apart and linked electronically. Traffic engineers say this should eventually triple road space and eliminate most traffic jams.

We may live to see a day when lineups are history and humankind is “resqueued.”