The baggage carousel in the airport is terribly inefficient. What I would like to see would be a system that elliminates the carousel all together. Maybe they could put RFID tags in the luggage tags and then have a machine that sorts the bags automatically. Then, instead of having all the bags come out of one chute on a carousel, they could come out of multiple chutes on separate conveyor belts.
For example, there could be ten numbered chutes, each with its own conveyor belt. Each passenger will have their bags tagged with a number, 1-10, and will have the tag number put on their ticket. If you have multiple bags, they will all get the same number. Then, at the destination, your bags will come out of the chute that matches the number on your ticket. Being that there are ten conveyors, only one tenth of the passengers will be waiting at any given conveyor. This would reduce crowding dramatically and make baggage retrieval much faster and easier.
If there's enough room in the terminal, there could be more than ten chutes. The tags could simply include numbers greater than ten, or they could use letters for up to 26 chutes.
All the chutes could be in the same long wall. The conveyors would simply carry the bags straight out into the room. All the conveyors would be parallel, with enough space between them for people to stand on both sides of each conveyor plus room to walk past each other. Any bags not picked up immediately will just collect at the end of the conveyors. The belt should only move when a bag is added to it. Once the bag is moved out of the chute, the belt would stop until another bag is added. This will reduce needless wear on the bottom of the bags and would also save electricity.
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That would mean 10 conveyor belts for each Flight coming in. There would need to be a complete redesign of the system which would be extraordinarily expensive. However, if the baggage were sorted before coming out onto the belt and stacked efficiently then the conveyor would bring the luggage out in a numbered sequence. Passengers could get in line by number and as they walked up they could directly retrieve their baggage. Sorting passengers would be as simple as putting numbers on the handrails of a walkway.
The problem with this scenario is that when baggage is late, passengers may have to stand in line for a while until the baggage arrives.
Passengers arriving late or not wanting to stand in line could walk over to the end of the conveyor and wait for the baggage to be set off onto the floor.
The end of the conveyor could be colocated with the "lost baggage" office to save the airport personnel from extra labor.
Yes, there are many different systems possible that would be better than the crazy carousel. The system I described might not be the best one, but then every system will have some drawbacks. Junk, I'm not quite sure what you mean in the system you described. Are you saying that the passengers would be in a line along side a long belt that brings the bags to everyone at once, or are you saying the belt would give the bags to the passengers one at a time, but in a preselected order?