MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2026 -- And now, fellow travelers, let us slide down the slipperiest slope imaginable: How much should we spend to be safe and secure on the road?

Safety and security is, at the end of the day, a numbers game. How much money should be spent on a safety system that might lower the risk of a crash? What's the acceptable number? Is a million dollars a fair amount to spend to make aircraft 1% safer? How about $10 million? Is $100 million too much spend to get that extra 1%? A billion?

Same thing for security. How much do we spend to catch a potential security risk before they maybe perpetrate a dastardly deed? Is spending a million dollars to catch a terrorist before the act worth it to save a life? But what if the cost is $10 million? A hundred million? A billion? A hundred billion?

By now you're thinking: Uh-oh, Brancatelli's on a screed …

You're wrong. I have numbers specific to one particular new program that we should consider.

You almost surely missed it, but today marks the first anniversary of the European Union's Entry/Exit System. Conceived more than a dozen years ago, EES finally rolled out voluntarily on October 12, 2025, at airports, seaports and rail stations in the Schengen Zone. It became "mandatory" on April 10.

As we know, EES has been an operational disaster. The biometric kiosks, meant to capture our photos, passport info and fingerprints, are wonky. They break down with regularity and gum up the process of entering or leaving an EU nation. Things were so bad this summer that many airports simply shut off the kiosks and returned to the traditional hand-stamping of passports. Several still ignore the kiosks, notably Paris/CDG and Athens. The EES app that supposedly makes things better? It only works in two of the 29 countries using EES.

And the delays. The endless, infuriating, insulting waits. Travelers feel blessed if they get through in an hour. Two-hour waits were standard last month at Amsterdam airport, Schiphol officials admit. Some waits this year stretched to five hours. Flights were missed. Flight delays were massive.

The psychic bottom line is indisputable: Travelers hate EES. Airlines hate EES. Airports hate EES.

Who doesn't hate EES? The people who invented it. An obscure agency called eu-LISA, tucked away in a literal corner of the EU (Tallinn, Estonia), thinks EES is going swimmingly. It even published a clutch of statistics to prove it.

And here's where we get to the price of all this and the value we place on "safety" and "security."

EES cost 500 million to 2 billion euros to create and implement. No one knows for sure because EES is existentially paired with another program, ETIAS, which is an acronym for another column. But just for grins and giggles, let's lowball it and say EES has cost "only" 500 million euros to go from conception to airport common area.

The folks at eu-LISA can't wait to tell you what those 500 million euros have wrought:
        EES stopped as many as 44,500 individuals from entering the EU out of roughly 110 million recorded journeys.
        About 16,000 of those people were turned away because they couldn't offer clear proof of their journey and/or the financial wherewithal to sustain it.
        As many as 8,700 others were refused entry for exceeding the time limit for visits on a previous EU trip.
        Of the 44,500 or so, 800 were barred as "security" or "public order" risks.

For the purposes of sanity and clarity, let us skip the rant about spending 500 million euros to "catch" 44,500 out of 110 million visitors. Because spending 500 million euros to inconvenience 110 million people in order to catch 0.04% of them is too absurd to take seriously.

Let's focus on those 800 supposed bad actors. The folks who created EES think spending 500 million euros to keep 800 suspect people out of the European Union is worth celebrating.

Um, okay. Again, for sanity and clarity, let's say that EES caught 800 people who some intelligence or police agency somewhere said were risky for security or, ahem, "public order" reasons.

Do the math, fellow travelers. Okay, don't. Too complicated. Let my calculator do it for you.

Finding 800 purported nasty needles in a 110-million-person haystack is 0.000727%. That is seven-hundred-twenty-seven millionths of a percent. Europe has delayed, infuriated and humiliated 110 million travelers to flag seven-hundred-twenty-seven millionths of a percent of them.

That, to me, sounds crazy in a way only bureaucrats could consider sane.

But to the bottom line we go: Assuming 500 million is the real cost of EES and all 800 of those people were genuinely risky characters, the EU has paid 625,000 euros each to identify them or deny them entry or detain them.

Is 625,000 euros per bad guy worth it? What if EES really cost a billion euros to build? And what if only 400 of the 800 were truly dangerous? Then it would be 2.5 million euros per bad guy. Is that worth it? What if only a dozen of those 800 could honestly be categorized as a person intent on doing harm? If the EES build-out truly cost "only" 500 million euros, now we're talking more than 40 million a head. Is that worth it?

I have no answers because, as I said at the top, the price of safety and security is a slippery slope. These are matters better left to philosophers and politicians and, in the end, your conscience.

But I will tell you this: Inconveniencing 110 million travelers is no small matter. If each one was delayed by, say, 30 minutes because of EES, that's 55 million hours lost. What is the value of 55 million hours? How much could tourists have spent in shops and restaurants with 55 million extra hours? How much more productive would business travelers have been if they had those 55 million hours back?

I'm thinking there had to be a better, cheaper, less inconvenient and less cumbersome way to find 800 alleged bad actors. But your mileage may vary because, you know, slippery slope …