> establishes societal expectations of a relatively even playing field
I want to agree with you, but disregarding the clear thing - is it really optimal (and not only locally optimal) to not have any means (not per se financial) to not have everyone be handled equally and fairly, especially if we're talking things like "expedited access", usually for people who have put in some work once in order to speed up their daily/weekly/monthly thing over the average person doing the activity once per year or decade.
Maybe I'm just being too focused on this example at hand, but if you look at immigration queues, we often have these "this is for local people where we don't have to check anything, really" and "this is for people who might need to find their visa and it could be complicated, thus a long line" - or the simple example of buying a monthly ticket for public transport and not standing in line at the ticket machine.