A Disney World-style queuing system could prevent a Brexit-induced border meltdown this Christmas
It's time to stop trucking around and fix a recurring problem permanently
A brief programming note: I’m so sorry that I didn’t manage to get a piece out last week to paid subscribers. This isn’t a massively sympathetic problem, but basically I spent most of last week working on two pieces, got about 85% of the way through both and decided… I sort of hate them? They weren’t quite working as they were. And as I want to make sure I’m giving you good stuff, I took the decision not to publish. I am determined, however, to get something (maybe even a couple of things?) out this week, I promise!
In the meantime, I wanted to re-share this piece, which is one of my favourites. It’s also newly relevant. As of yesterday, the new EU entry-exit system (EES) is live. And whether or not the implementation is initially smooth, there will be a big challenge coming as we head towards Christmas. But luckily – there is a solution. It just needs the government to.. actually do it.
I’m still not over Brexit.
Intellectually, I can see that it was a terrible idea by looking at pretty much every economic statistic produced since 2016. And I could bore on at great length about why it was strategically disastrous for Britain, given broader geopolitics.
But emotionally, I feel the Brexit pain most viscerally when travelling into the European Union. Instead of gliding in and out of the e-passport gates like I used to, I now have to endure the indignity of schlepping into the “miscellaneous” queue, and explaining myself to a human border agent.
It’s a moment when it very much feels as though the march of progress has stalled.
But, in the grand scheme of things, I know this doesn’t really matter all that much. The functional crossing of the border is a relatively trivial part of Britain’s new wilderness era, right?
Well, actually… no. What’s merely annoying for me is a nightmare for the people at the sharp end of, er, the Brexit dividend.
For example, because of the need to physically stamp passports and more thoroughly check travel documents, our frontiers are a source of much more friction, and this has real world consequences.
Eurostar trains from St Pancras, for example, are reportedly regularly leaving the station with around a third of the seats empty. The extra processing time means that not enough passengers can get through security in time for their trains, and the station has no straightforward way to physically expand processing capacity1.
However, passenger rail travel like this is arguably the easy part. Every Eurostar customer has to pre-book a train ticket, so as the company has shown, it’s possible to ration the tickets and simply sell fewer seats to avoid overloading the station2.
The real problem for Brexit border crossings is how to handle freight that uses Port of Dover ferries, or Eurotunnel trains from Folkestone. These are collectively known as the “Kent Portals”, and they are the major crossing point between Britain and the continent.
Unsurprisingly, together they are absolutely critical to the British economy. They are literally why we have much of the food on the shelves of our supermarkets, as 60% of the goods we trade with the EU goes through the Kent Portals.
This includes a disproportionate amount of things that can’t hang around waiting to cross for very long, like fresh food and pharmaceuticals, because durable goods (like furniture or electronics or whatever), are more likely to arrive via container ship instead.
So managing the flow of trucks to the portals is an insanely important logistical challenge. And even before Brexit, it was very tricky to do.
The fundamental problem is that the optimal flow – the maximum rate at which lorries can pass through the portals without the whole system getting jammed up – varies depending on circumstances.
For example, if there is a storm on the English Channel and ferries are delayed, it will cause lorry traffic to build up in the port and on the M20, the motorway that heads to Dover. Or if there are signalling problems with the trains on either side of the Channel, then similarly, the delays have a knock-on effect on freight traffic queues.
Then since Brexit, even more variables have been introduced. Customs and passport checks are now more rigorous, and are thus more time consuming, just like with Eurostar.
And as of yesterday, the bureaucratic burden is going to rise even further, as the EU has introduced an Entry/Exit System (EES). This is a new requirement to record the biometrics of every non-EU citizen entering the bloc – meaning that British travellers will have to have their photo taken and fingerprints scanned when heading to Europe. I’m told this new requirement could increase processing times per person from around 45 seconds currently – to potentially several minutes.
Then next year, the EU is going to launch an electronic travel authorisation system similar to the “ESTA” system used by the United States, so that will have to be checked too when you get your passport scanned. This could also slow things down.
All of this added together, and it seems pretty likely to me that later this year – particularly around Christmas – that a major storyline in politics could be the inevitable delays and traffic jams heading to the Kent Portals, as the system inevitably snarls up when these new requirements, meet added demand and bad weather.
In fact, last year a cross-party group of Kent councillors tried to raise the alarm about the new EES checks causing problems – warning that there could be queues and food supply issues.
And even if – somehow – the rollout is smooth, “travel nightmare” stories, caused by the Kent Portals being overloaded, are a perennial news story, as congestion seemingly inevitably flares up at peak times. They are part of the background hum of politics – just like the increase in migrant crossings every summer, the NHS having a winter crisis, or Laurence Fox soiling himself for attention.
But here’s the thing: These travel meltdowns don’t have to be inevitable. There could be a better way to manage the flow of freight traffic across the channel. And if Britain were serious, it could mitigate the problem before it becomes a crisis.
So read on to find out how.
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The problem of freight
The thing to know about freight is that crossing the channel as a lorry driver is very different from how the rest of us do it.
When you go on holiday to France, you’ll typically have booked months in advance for a specific sailing or train. And if you’re me, you’ll turn up three hours early, instead of the recommended one hour, to make sure there’s absolutely no chance that you miss it.
But lorries are different: There is no pre-booking. Freight is simply a first come, first serve queuing system. And sometimes drivers may not have even decided whether they’re going to take the train or the ferry – they’ll sometimes make the decision based on which service is busier when they reach the Portals, and their decision will be often based on trucker-specific factors, such as how many hours they have worked.3
This makes the traffic problem more difficult. The obvious solution – making lorries book long in advance like us tourists – just isn’t workable. This is because logistics is a much more dynamic industry: With just-in-time supply chains now the norm, and the complexity of getting goods from A to B, it just isn’t possible to guarantee with any accuracy that a specific truck will want to be on the 3pm ferry on a Tuesday in a month’s time. This is because it’s only going to move once it is full or someone needs it be somewhere.
So all of this ultimately means that there isn’t an existing way to manage incoming traffic. Lorries arrive when they arrive – and this, when combined with a fluctuating optimal flow rate, is what causes the snarl ups.
Brock and roll
There are already a number of systems that exist to manage the flow of traffic to the Kent Portals.
For example, since 1988, the government has had “Operation Stack” that it can deploy – a plan which closes parts of the M20 and forces lorries to park along its length.
And since Brexit, there has been “Operation Brock”. This is a plan that uses movable barriers on the M20 to move excess lorries into holding areas off the road. This includes parking lorries on the runway of the long-defunct Manston Airport, which is actually 20 miles north of Dover, near Margate.
There are also now customs facilities further back from the actual Portals, just outside of Ashford in Sevington, which means that paperwork can be completed further back, where there is more space – theoretically meaning that there should be less friction at the business end of the Portals.4
But the fundamental problem with all of these options is that they are basically just sticking plasters to the permanent challenge of needing to manage the flow of freight traffic in a system when the number of lorries the Portals can cope with at any given time regularly and sometimes unexpectedly fluctuates.
The existing regime is also hugely resource intensive. Operation Brock requires spinning up police, council and government resources in an ad-hoc manner to direct traffic, lay cones and so on.
And more importantly, these mitigations are still gruelling for the poor lorry drivers themselves. If they’re told to park up on the side of the M20, or in an overflow area, it isn’t like they can leave their vehicle and go to the beach – instead, they just have to wait for however long it is until the logjam is over, and hope there is a bathroom nearby.5
So in other words, this is very annoying. But as I hinted above – there is actually a better way to do this. We could use technology to make this better.
Join the virtual queue
In February 2020, just before the world shut down, I went to Disney World for the first time.6
The motivation for the visit was to experience the new Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge area of the park, which contained the newly-opened ride Rise of the Resistance. It was by some distance the most in-demand attraction in the park, so instead of the normal queuing system used by other rides, Disney implemented a virtual queue.
The way it worked was that when we arrived at the park, we used an app to register our interest, and we were allocated a “boarding group”.7 Then we could spend the rest of the day exploring the rest of the park, with the app alerting us when it was our turn to head back and have our turn.
It was – obviously – a much better way to handle the queue, as it meant that we did not just waste our day standing in line.8
So this raises the obvious question: If Disney can do this, why can’t we do something similar at the Kent Portals?
It doesn’t seem inconceivable that we could manage the Kent Portals in a similar way. Instead of reaching for ad-hoc emergency brakes like Operation Brock when the roads get busy, it must surely be possible to routinise fluctuating capacity by using a virtual queuing system, like the one at Disney World, right?9
This brings me to a company called Eloy, which has developed something I think is rather cool.
In a nutshell, the company has designed its own virtual queuing platform that can do, well, exactly this.
At a high level, the company says its software can model traffic demand to monitor traffic flow, and it has done some clever AI simulations to test how its algorithms could impact on traffic in Kent.
But what’s more interesting is what this means in practice.
For example, if lorry drivers were instructed to use Eloy’s software10, it could mean that instead of driving down the M20 and joining the end of the queue and getting stuck waiting on the road, drivers could be dynamically routed so that lorries arrive at the Portals at a rate that they can handle. And if the Portals are busy, drivers could instead park up at a truck stop and relax in relative comfort – with toilets, hot food, showers and even gyms11.
Then when there is space on a ferry or on a train, a notification can be sent to their phone, telling them to get back on the road and head for the Portal. That’s a much better outcome for everyone.
There are other advantages to building out a proper system too. For example, if the roads get really jammed up – say, when it’s the run up to Christmas, when Europe has just introduced new legal requirements, and storms have made the sea crossing too dangerous – then freight traffic could be instructed to wait further ‘upstream’, at truck stops further inland, instead of driving blindly into a nightmare.
Eloy also tells me that its system is customised to meet the specific needs of truckers too, and can factor in specific circumstances, like the need for mandatory breaks – and security requirements that mean that certain hazardous goods are only allowed to be transported by ferry, and not through the tunnel.
And this also means that it could be possible to do something smarter with the queuing system as a whole. Instead of pure first come, first serve, different types of loads could be prioritised – meaning that hazardous chemicals or trucks full of fresh fish will not have to wait around for so long12. And I guess the algorithm could even choose which trucks are called to move to the Portals based on break patterns too, to maximise drivers’ rest and minimise their redundant time.13
Carousel of progress
Unfortunately, even if I got my dream, and we were to rejoin the EU, sign up to the Schengen Area and erect a statue of Guy Verhofstadt on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square, freight crossing the channel would still be a big logistical problem.
Even if there were no bureaucratic friction at the border, issues like the weather, the reliability of the rail network, and the need for some security checks would remain.
So given this reality, it seems like we should do something better here. We shouldn’t accept that sometimes lorry drivers are just going to get stranded, and that border crossings are going to semi-regularly require a crisis response.14
Given that Eloy has the technology seemingly ready to go, it seems like a no-brainer to me, especially given the current status-quo has all of the “could easily develop into a shitstorm” qualities of every other political crisis where we’ve long known about the underlying problems for ages, and yet done nothing to fix them.
I understand that the virtual queuing technology to make this happen could conceivably be deployed in two or three months – and that there are even people in government who are aware of this option. This means that conceivably it wouldn’t even be too late to do something ahead of the EES introduction. But the problem is the usual story of competing priorities (especially with a new government still settling in) and burdensome procurement processes slowing things down.
But in any case, regardless of the EES deadline – there’s a strong case for taking a lesson from the Disney World playbook. We might not be able to make Brexit Britain the Happiest Place on Earth – but surely we can make crossing the Channel that little bit less annoying?
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My not particularly well evidenced view here is that they should extend Crossrail to Ebbsfleet, and then offload most Eurostar departures to Ebbsfleet, which is a larger site with more room for expansion. That way, most people arriving in London would exit at St Pancras – close to the centre of the city where they need to be. And most people departing would just factor extra journey time into their travel plans.
Drivers are legally obliged to take a 45 minute break every four and a half hours of driving –and while they can officially take their break on the ferry, the train is too quick for it to count. I’m also told that facilities are important too – the ferries have nicer food.
Connoisseurs of the Brexit Wars period of British politics may remember talk about a “Kent Access Permit” – this was a legal restriction on border-bound lorries entering Kent unless they had completed their customs paperwork well ahead of time. But this has since been abolished.
Lorry drivers can typically ‘survive’ for longer than car drivers as their cabins will typically have somewhere for them to sleep and a microwave, but without the facilities that you would find a real truck-stop, it is still far more gruelling than (let’s be real) my white-collar audience of people who work cushy office jobs could deal with.
I’m also 100% certain that I was also one of the first people in the country to get COVID – I suspect this may not have been a coincidence.
This was actually quite an intense process. We had to hammer away at the Disney app at bang-on 8am to bag our spaces on the ride – and as we were stood in an enormous crowd of people trying to do the same thing, as the app loaded and refreshed, all around us were other groups of people sporadically cheering as they won places – piling on the pressure on us as it was clear space was running out.
Though something that I did find very striking at Disney was how absolutely rock-solid the wifi was throughout the park. This was great for navigating and using the Disney app and so on, but it also made the necessary downtime in other queues much more bearable. For example, during the two hour wait for the much-less-impressive Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run ride, I could fight on Twitter about politics, just like being back at home.
This footnote is to placate the people who will inevitably want to be pedantic about exactly how the queuing system works at Disney – which has changed several times since I was there. I think the current system is actually two queues: A normal queue, and then a paid “lightning lane” to bleed even more cash out of guests. Anyway, obviously in this piece I am referring to the more anodyne virtual queue that used to exist.
Or if there were a government-approved lorry drivers app that licensed the technology, etc etc.
The Disney equivalent of this is that when queues become too long, they will often deploy an actor dressed as Kylo Ren or whoever to entertain people who are waiting. Maybe the government could deploy someone cosplaying as Louise Haigh to do similar for the truckers?
Just don’t call it “VIP lanes”…
As a killjoy vegetarian, I am very strongly favour of extremely strict animal welfare standards, even if you are eventually going to be horrifically murdering the poor animals. I hope, one day, society sees the light and stops eating them, making this no longer a problem.
Even though it sometimes leads to heartwarming stories.
Seems very sensible, and would make a return to the single market and customs union so much smoother
Similarly, extend the Eurotunnel shuttle for lorries through the East Thames Tunnel to the M11/M25 junction, and reimpose the Kent border so all the lorries used it (unless barred by tunnel restrictions, who would use ferries).