The Limits of Transportation Security

Terrorists attack airplanes for the  very good reason that airplanes are comparatively vulnerable. Airplanes are lightly  built, and highly flammable, and untoward events may very well cause them to crash. At the same time, aircraft  are highly mobile, and can be taken places according  to the terrorist's convenience. Most other  transportation equipment, not needing to be light  enough to get off the ground, is  the reverse. It tends to travel along prepared routes, such as railroad tracks, and its movement can eventually be contained by roadblocks or the equivalent. The terrorist who takes over a land vehicle sooner or later finds himself in the position of holding a static building, which has a rather higher ratio of windows and doors, relative to  its size, than most buildings.

Passenger  trains are not  very vulnerable to terrorism. Look at the two European train bombing cases. They both occurred in morning rush-hour, and both involved what we would call subways rather than commuter trains, ie. cars with outsize doors, standing-room-only, no room for a train conductor to move around, if there had been one. The attacks involved "backpack bombs," containing twenty pounds or more of explosives, and steel shrapnel for greater effect. However, each bomb only managed to kill about ten or  twenty people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_to_the_2005_London_bombings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes

Here are a series of English cases, involving people who "heard voices," and wandered around small towns, shooting whoever they met:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkseaton_shootings

And an American case, involving an automobile in suburbia, rather than small towns:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks

The terrorists, for all their effort, were not  able to score greater "bags," on per-man basis, than people with steam coming out of their ears. Their bombs were only effective to the extent  that passengers were crowded together. These conditions obtain in subway cars, but they also obtain in elevators, and in waiting lines in offices, supermarkets, etc. People will put up  with being  "sardined" for a few  minutes, but they won't do it for any length of time.

Long-distance trains are, of course, much less crowded than commuter or subway trains, and make worse targets. The basic structure and running gear of a railroad car are built more or less "like a tank." It is possible to "harden" passenger cars by dividing them up  into compartments, after the fashion of a traditional European train.  I ran across a comment by a British railroad expert, discussing the characteristic nineteenth-century American "open  plan" car with the observation that "... it also assisted sociability, and Americans loved to talk to strangers, wherever they went." (Ellis, p. 226). It was understood that a self-respecting Englishman, fastidious in his acquaintance, would naturally prefer an enclosed compartment, with its own separate door leading out onto the station platform. One could bribe the ticket collector to insure that no one else was allowed to share one's compartment. An eventual compromise was the side-corridor coach, built like a sleeping car, with compartments, but with a corridor as well. At one point, the London Underground (subway) had first-class cars built on  the compartment system, catering to a type of passenger who was effectively in transition from the horse-cab to the motor-taxi.

[Cuthbert] Hamilton Ellis [1909-1987,  Fellow of the Royal Society of Art, Associate of the Institute of Locomotive Engineers], _The Pictoral History of Railways_, 1968.

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw124016/Cuthbert-Hamilton-Ellis
http://nbrwaverley.blogspot.com/

This would have to be modified somewhat as applied to American railroad cars. Dividers could be placed between rows of seats,  extending from the side of the car to the center aisle. The overhead baggage compartments could be fitted with kevlar doors, and special blow-out  panels could be fitted into the car roofs, the same system employed for the ammunition compartments of tanks. Long-distance trains are about the only trains for which TSA-style security could  be implemented without bringing the system to a complete stop, and they are also the case where there is the least danger.

The kind of transportation equipment which involves crowding, typically buses or subways, is precisely the kind of equipment which would be brought to a complete  halt by any kind of security.

The airlines feel threatened by improvements in passenger trains. In Europe, where fast  passenger trains have  been given full encouragement, and trains run as fast as two hundred miles an hour, regional airlines are being slowly but steadily driven out of business. As a matter of physics, trains can keep on going faster, and airlines, hemmed in by the speed of sound, cannot compete effectively. Trains have run experimentally at more than three  hundred and fifty miles an hour. If one views the TSA as a "captive bureaucracy," it is  understandable that it would seek to sabotage any means of transportation which competes with the airlines. The TSA would attempt to saddle all other forms of transportation with whatever liabilities  the airlines labored under. 

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(12/30/2010 03:59 AM)