>when I was still bothering to fly in and out of the Bay Area I chose SFO over SJC because I preferred the private SFO security guard over real TSA employees.
This seems crazy to me - the security line at SJC takes about four minutes to get through and you can park about a hundred feet away from the checkpoint. SFO takes FOREVER to get through.
Airlines are competing against other forms of travel (I, for example, mostly just drive everywhere I can these days, though this is only in part due to the TSA checkpoints: there's tons of stuff to hate about air travel if you can avoid it) and travel as a concept is competing against other activities (whether leisure or business: if you don't enjoy travel, you are less likely to just randomly hop on a plane and go somewhere; you take more phone calls and watch more television).
Airports are also competing against other airports, and usage of TSA employees is optional: when I was still bothering to fly in and out of the Bay Area I chose SFO over SJC because I preferred the private SFO security guard over real TSA employees. The incentives might be mild (as again, there are tons of other things for them to optimize), but they definitely do exist; if nothing else, "correctly optimize the number of employees to manage long lines" seems like a big win.
https://skift.com/2016/05/27/more-airports-may-ditch-the-tsa...
> Still, airports that have switched to private firms say they consider the contractors more responsive and better able to adjust staffing to address traffic surges and lulls.
> Delta and United airlines will spend as much as $4 million each hiring extra workers to manage the lines at this busiest airports.