It Was One of the Worst Parts About Air Travel for 19 Years. It’s Finally Gone.

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In the annals of strategic oversteps in America’s post-9/11 forever war, our shoeless airport security lines will go down as a footnote.

But boy, was that policy, enacted in 2006 and abandoned without fanfare earlier this week, a pain in the butt. Adopted after a self-proclaimed al-Qaida member tried and failed to set off explosives inside his boots on a 2001 flight from Paris to Miami, the requirement forced U.S. flyers to show feet approximately 10 billion times over its 19-year existence. If each of those people spent a minute on the process, the total comes to more than 250,000 years of shoes off, shoes on.

If the rule deterred any subsequent attacks, the Department of Homeland Security has not said. Unlike other airport checkpoint procedures, such as limits on liquids, the shoe rule was never adopted by the rest of the world—without any adverse effect. Some critics have argued that it and other security protocols may have taken more lives than they saved, by pushing travelers toward driving, a much more dangerous option than flying. In any case, the obligation to take off your kicks was viewed in surveys as the most annoying part of airport security and was once deemed the second-worst part of flying, after ticket prices. So bad, in fact, that skirting the requirement has been the main selling point in the Transportation Security Administration’s own ads for its PreCheck system.

Since at least 2011, officials at DHS have promised a shoes-on future, and the department’s own science arm developed and licensed a “high definition–advanced imaging technology shoe scanner.” In January, the DHS announced that the machine would be deployed by 2026, promising, in a demonstration with the TSA, a footwear scan in seconds.

On Tuesday afternoon, though, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced a nationwide change in shoe policy, alluding to a “layered” security approach without rolling out those high-tech scanners. Millions of travelers have already been through security with their shoes on.

If barefoot security is really on its last legs, it marks the end of an era. As part of the post-9/11 suite of policies that included the creation of the TSA in 2001, shoe removal incarnated what seemed to be a one-way ratchet of security theater. Just as the freedom of the automobile brought about new and invasive policing methods that made driving the primary source of Americans’ interactions with law enforcement, the freedom of flying forced us to submit to degrading procedures including full-body scans, pat-downs, and having our luggage publicly riffled through.

Those requirements changed the meaning of time in airports, forcing travelers to cushion their trips with buffers that turned airports from easy come, easy go public places to highly secured obstacle courses. Along with the post-deregulation boom in passenger traffic and the rise of low-cost carriers, they helped banish those old myths of ease and elegance that characterized movies like Catch Me if You Can and structures like New York’s TWA Terminal.

Instead, the weird collective intimacy of padding across the travertine floor for a body scan became synonymous with the hassles of 21^st-century air travel. Shoes were a small part of the TSA rigmarole, but taking them off is an act that many Americans are reluctant to perform even at a friend’s house. The contortions of so many travelers bending, crouching, and hopping alongside the metal detector lent comic flavor to the plane journey.

In a way, the end of the no-shoe rule offers a moment of optimism. Even in an American political world ruled by fear, there is space to take the risk of eliminating a silly regulation. Perhaps only Trump could have done it, as only Nixon could have gone to China. But that news is tempered by the drumbeat of reports from the other end of the airport, where scores of arriving travelers have been detained in frightening conditions and under flimsy pretenses. The airport remains as anxious a gateway as ever, and if some burden has been lifted for those who are taking off, it’s more present than ever for those who are landing.