Perhaps lines elsewhere have grown so long that other voices are finally being heard. On Monday, the T.S.A. shook up its leadership and added administrators in Chicago. It is even beginning to consider an approach that might partly address the core economic problem by measuring and making public the time spent in line.

You might object that such measurements are pointless because this time spent is a small price to pay for safety. That’s true, but only up to a point. It is an illusion to think that, by waiting in line, we are buying complete safety. In every domain, we make a trade-off between risks and costs. We do not post 10-mile-per-hour speed limits on all highways, even though that would be safer. We try to find a balance between travel time and fatalities.

But by failing to explicitly consider the value of our time, the T.S.A. cannot make sensible trade-offs. For example, suppose the agency finds that shoe removal does very little to improve safety but is one of the biggest sources of airport delay.

In the current system, the benefits of eliminating shoe removal would be felt by passengers but would not affect the T.S.A.’s budget. If anything, the agency has an incentive to engage in procedures that appear safe, rather than ones that are safe. If it allows everyone to keep their shoes on and something bad happens, the T.S.A. might be blamed for speeding things up rather than keeping us safe.

We have no way of knowing whether the current procedures are optimal. But given the importance of salience in risk perception — what is vivid in our minds is perceived as more risky — we suspect that many policies amount to nothing more than barn door closing. What we do know is that in the agency’s calculus, a central cost is being neglected. It is entirely possible that we can reduce lines significantly with little or no negative effect on safety by, for example, adopting some of the expedited PreCheck procedures for all passengers.

We think better decisions would be made if saving both time and money were part of the T.S.A.’s official mandate.

We are not in a position to say what procedures should change, but we have suggestions that should help by improving measurement and disclosure.