In the early 2000s there was a great Ali G sketch where he asked a national security official whether they were worried about "terrorists hijacking driving a train into the white house." The official responded "There are no train tracks leading into the white house". Ali G: "but what if they've been building them at night?"
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.
I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.
Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!
Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?
A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.
I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.
Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!
Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?
A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
"Americans deserve to feel safe when they’re traveling."
It'd be better if the .gov was engaging in reasonable security practices that also includes mechanisms for citizens and legal residents to seek redress when the .gov puts them on a watch list mistakenly (or on purpose as a means of retribution) rather than making people "feel safe".
"Americans have no responsibility to take two seconds to ask themselves if their anxieties are based in reality, and as a consequence, they get to make their irrational fears everyone else's problem"
Remember when we gave the government all sorts of power to fix the environment, build infrastructure, feed the poor, etc. and then they actually used their power to fix those problems rather than just stomping on dissenters and calling it problem solved?
I'm being only a little hyperbolic here. TSA can only do this crap because they have authority to do this crap and they only have that authority because congress lets them because people let them because people keep falling for the same old dumb lies.
They already tried it once in Tennessee. IIRC, it was only for truckers and after a good bit of blowback, they claimed it had been voluntary (though the truckers didn't know that) and strictly informational.
"The tests being done in conjunction with TSA are designed to evaluate how a system that has proven to be highly effective in providing safe travel in the airline industry will work most effectively in passenger rail operations."
Highly effective, indeed[1]. The US would probably be better off dropping the pretense and paying the 55,000 employees of the TSA to do nearly anything else instead. Even continuing to pay them their entire salaries while eliminating their jobs would save money in the form of increased airport efficiency.
It's really important we have that 3 in 70 chance the TSA catches someone trying to get a bomb onboard a plane! Airport security isn't about preventing loss of life. It's about keeping the passenger airline industry alive.
Biden is famously pro-rail and I think this is just a way of killing off rail before he has a chance to fund a bunch of construction and equipment. Which is sad, because our federal highway system is crumbling in decay because we way, way overbuilt it.
It's all moot. No matter how much security there is, no matter how badly intelligence services or political leaders fuck up (in the case of 9/11, it was political leadership. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, it was intelligence), they'll just shout that they need more surveillance, more security measures, more rules. Nobody will ever say "no, you intelligence people need to do your job properly."
The TSA works for Biden, this is an action of an executive branch office, and an action that requires a significant amount of budget. If Biden didn't want this to happen it would stop at a stroke of his pen. If this is a move to kill passenger rail, then it's Biden that is killing it.
When I lived near Dulles airport I frequently used the train to travel up the north east as far as NY or Boston-- even though the train was often more expensive. The fact that I didn't have to deal with the TSA and their intrusive searches was a significant part of that. From the article it sounds like they're only currently planning to quietly invade your privacy in the background, which might not the rail killing effect you are concerned with. But if they did go full airport-tsa style handling of the trains then I wouldn't be shocked if it killed passenger rail: Not dealing with the TSA may not be a reason for most passengers, but it only has to be a reason for enough to bring it under a threshold of viability.
It seems unlikely that Biden wants to kill passenger rail. He's made a pretty big deal of using Amtrak between DC and Delaware to commute when he was in Congress. TSA has tried this before with Amtrak and it's possible that this decision is being made at a level lower than that of the president.
I understand the most effective change was reinforcing and locking the cockpit doors. Despite the seemingly ineffective TSA checkpoints, I do wonder how well it works as a deterrent. AFAIK simple for-profit hijacking of planes used to be more common before 9/11. I haven't heard about any such incident since. How much of that isn't because the potential perpetrators were deterred from even trying?
The only event I know of where that new policy played a central role was in the 2015 disaster in which a suicidal pilot locked the cabin while his co-worker took a bathroom break, and crashed the plane:
> "On March 24, 2015, the co-pilot of a German airliner deliberately flew the plane into the French Alps, killing himself and the other 149 people onboard. When it crashed, Germanwings flight 9525 had been traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany. (history.com)"
I believe there's now a strict rule of two pilots in the cockpit at all times as a result. Also, hijacked planes are now much more likely to be shot down by military jets if they approach urban areas, which is not a topic airlines like to discuss.
What actually changed with the luggage matching? Googling this only gives me one-liners that don't explain what changed. Was there some way to check luggage anonymously before?
Not anonymously but if you checked-in, checked a bag, and then didn’t board, typically your bag may not still fly, now on most international flights if you don’t board, they go pull the bag from the aircraft.
I tried to estimate how many deaths TSA is responsible for from traffic fatalities from their employees commuting to work, thinking that maybe more people died this way than lives were saved from prevented terror attacks. Turns out driving is really safe and not many fatalities are due to TSA employees commutes.
But how many people were saved from cancer deaths, because they weren’t exposed to more radiation in the upper atmosphere? Is that offset by breathing more ozone and PM2.5 on the roadway?
I've never understood the banana reference. Are they saying that there's so little radiation from a high altitude flight that it's the equivalent to a banana, or that a banana is an unusually high source of radiation?
Bananas are rich in potassium which can be radioactive. On average, bananas emit roughly similar amounts of radiation as high altitude flight. The intent is to demonstrate the silliness of the argument that flying poses some kind of radiation risk that elevates mortality - would you claim that eating a banana (even at population scale) meaningfully changes mortality?
People hear radiation and lose rationality because of the fear mongering in the 50s and beyond.
> would you claim that eating a banana (even at population scale) meaningfully changes mortality
Probably not, but only because "That's silly, bananas are just fruit!" rather than because of any scientific study I've seen or done. So you really shouldn't listen to me.
The only time I've really seen this info about bananas being bad is typically in Taboola sponsored ads that I'll never click on and only see when I'm using some device that's not mine not using blockers.
Just because of where the article is listed, I've always just assumed it to be crackpottery.
While practically true, this is sufficiently imprecise to bother the more pedantic variety of nerd; for accuracy I therefore quote the relevant section of Wikipedia (a resource we should give daily thanks for):
"Naturally occurring potassium is composed of three isotopes, of which potassium-40 is radioactive. Traces of potassium-40 are found in all potassium, and it is the most common radioisotope in the human body."
Not many is still not none, which is the order of magnitide for lives saved by the TSA.
While driving is safe, it's also a lot more dangerous than flying. So pushing people towards driving miles instead of flying iles also should have been a source of mortality in your analysis-- too bad that one is harder to assess. Since for many trips driving is often not a reasonable alternative there probably wouldn't be that many-- but again, it wouldn't take much to overcome any arguable benefit of the TSA.
And, of course, the enormous resources that go into the TSA could be instead funneled into actual lifesaving activities.
And with a bit of luck, those other jobs would contribute to society in other ways. The question the parent was trying to answer was whether having those people drive to their TSA jobs was a net good, measured in terms of "lives saved" which is the TSA's own metric of success - in other words, does it "pull its own weight", given the sunk cost of the commute?
Driving is more or less safe depending on the conditions - if the TSA was requiring workers to drive in on a Friday or Saturday in icy conditions where they otherwise would not that'd be way more dangerous than a 9am commute. Still relatively safe (although I really don't like the characterisation of driving as actually safe - people usually only look at the fatalities and ignore the injury rate which is dramatically higher).
I have been a frequent flyer with El Al (Israeli airline) both before 2001 and some years after that. I have not flied recently to Israel, so I do not know if their methods have changed, becoming more similar with what is typical for USA and Europe.
The methods used by Israel and by USA (the USA methods being imitated by most other countries) for checking the flight passengers did not have any resemblance.
After 2001, Israel did not make any change in their procedures, because there was no reason, their procedures were much better than what was invented then in USA.
While USA has relied on spending much money on improved machines for scanning people and luggage and in harassing the passengers with things like taking off the shoes, Israel did not rely on machines, but on ancient low-tech methods, i.e. well-trained professionals who questioned the passengers.
The main test that you had to pass to be allowed boarding were 2 separate discussions with 2 Israeli security agents, to whom you had to explain the purpose of your flight. The 2 agents asked mostly the same questions, but with various variations in content and order, so you had to tell convincingly the same story twice.
From the point of view of the traveler, the disadvantage of the Israeli method was that it was slow, a lot of time was needed for the discussions with the agents.
Nevertheless, I prefer that method, because it was much less stressful for me than having to do a lot of unpacking, then undressing, and then dressing, and then packing, while having to be very careful to not have something lost or stolen (I usually travel with a very large number of electronic devices, many of them small and easy to loose; I have also seen once how the laptop of another traveler was successfully stolen before entering the scanning machine, without anyone noticing how; I do not know whether the thief could have been identified later, from the security camera recordings).
In many hundreds of flights with El Al, I was subjected to a body search only once, while on the airlines embracing the USA model, many travelers now do not remember any more the times when they did not have to pass through a body and personal luggage security check.
The only one case when I had to pass through a body search was because I happened too be extremely tired and I wished that the discussions would pass faster, but of course, my noticeable haste had the opposite effect.
The flight was late in the evening and all the day I had been extremely busy. I had literally run through the city the entire day, to complete various errands in time from the flight. After much effort, I had succeeded to reach the airport just in time, but I was exhausted and I just wanted to reach the airplane ASAP, to finally be able to rest.
However, the security agents noticed that I seem to be in a hurry, and they thought that this is suspicious. Therefore I had to also pass through the body search, but like I have said, they did not do such searches on everyone, but only when they had grounds for suspicion.
In defense of the TSA, "security theater" is a legitimate form of security. They may never catch any would-be hijackers, but how many didn't make an attempt because they knew that they wouldn't be able to reliably sneak a gun past security? Look into news reports from the 60s and 70s, before serious security at airports. Hijackings were almost normal. Today, hijackings are thankfully almost non-existent. You don't end speed traps just because nobody got caught speeding last year.
I also appreciate the security theater because it makes airports a generally drug-free environment. I bet few here have ever spent much time on a bus. Not a short hop on a city bus, an overnight inter-state trip on a greyhound. I have a couple times and each time I would have PAID for a TSA-style check before boarding. It would weed out 99% of crazy/high people who make such journeys so miserable for everyone around them.
Anyone whose goal is to sneak a weapon through TSA would do a quick google and learn that they fail to catch weapons and contraband snuck through their checkpoints in their own tests about 95% of the time [1].
Everyone has seen those results, but have you looked into the nature of the devices they were using? These weren't handguns or swords. These were devices designed to mimic bombs, bombs built to best sneak past security checks.
That depends. TSA stops thousands of people from bringing firearms onto aircraft each year. Those are certainly not all terrorists, but it does indicate that, no matter the test results, the screening is necessary and at least somewhat effective.
>> By October 3rd of this year, TSA officers had stopped 4,495 airline passengers from carrying firearms onto their flights, surpassing the previous record of 4,432 firearms caught at checkpoints in the full calendar year 2019
I don’t think anyone is arguing for totally 0 checks. People just want to not need to unpack their bags, empty their pockets, take off their shoes/belt, and to be able to carry a water bottle.
To be honest, there's not a single check when you take Amtrak and things actually work just fine there. Something about being up in the sky makes people scared enough to go through a metal detector, I suppose.
Trains are intrinsically resistant to hijacking - it's really difficult to get them to divert to Cuba, or to crash them into a high rise building, unless one was somehow built on their path.
I'd really like to understand the TSA's scenario, it looks like another massive and pointless waste of money added to what that the organization already does in airports.
I agree trains are hard to redirect but planes are too, after they reinforced cockpit doors post-9/11. In my opinion that’s literally the only useful thing that came out of 9/11 from an air security perspective.
This goes back to our conversation upstream: nobody is saying that there shouldn't be security at airports. You shouldn't be allowed to bring a gun onto a plane, and our security systems should be sufficient to handle that case.
The actual items under dispute are: (1) what is the TSA's domain (anti-terrorism? catching personal amounts of drugs? guns?), and (2) why should we put up with all of the theater that isn't making us any safer?
We put up with them in the US because we have to & we don't get a choice. You'll notice that DHS & all of its component parts aren't part of the political process. Politicians never discuss their elimination. They are accepted as a intrinsic of the federal government. Removing TSA is like suggesting we don't need Congress.
Call me a misguided optimist, but I think it’s premature to say that “we don’t have a choice” until we’ve exhausted all of our options.
Most Americans don’t even know the names of their representatives. Improving the public’s ability to petition its officials is something we should try before completely giving up.
Or they would try to board in states where having a license to carry gives you an "oh, I forgot" defense to trying to carry a firearm through security at the airport.
Those people are human beings that need to get somewhere, too, and the bus is the cheapest way for them to do it. That's why they're there, and weeding them out with TSA isn't really the best solution IMO.
I think hijackings are over because everyone now knows that if you pull a knife or a gun on an airport, you will immediately get taken down by literally everyone on the flight. People before 9/11 didn't realize the downside risk of a hijacking was a suicide crash. It was just unthinkable. Now that we know, it will never happen again. TSA is not a factor.
You don't weed out the people, you weed out their drugs. The threat of being caught with drugs by a security guard means they don't bring their drugs with them onto the plane. Net result: fewer people currently on drugs sitting beside me while I try to sleep. I don't mind sleeping amongst a bunch of stranger on a plane or at an airport because I know they have at least been screened for basic weapons. Sleeping on an interstate bus or at a bus station is very different. See below. The knife in that killing would have been detected at any airport by even the laziest of TSA screeners.
So by preventing people from taking drugs on planes you are preventing terrorism? You do realize some airports have explicit policies on not looking or caring about drugs? Eg https://www.flylax.com/lax-marijuana-policy
Also your example is from Canada where there is no TSA yet people don't do similar things on planes, it's not an ideal example.
You really think that Canada doesn't have a TSA? They do. It is even called the CATSA, ie the CAnadian TSA. In fact, to comply pre-screening, CATSA is largely forced to mirror all US TSA rules. Literally the only difference between Canadian and American screening procedures is the colour of the uniforms.
Wow, they managed to reproduce the effectiveness of the TSA and lack of oversight in an entirely different legal system? That's impressive... Who do you have to petition to get off of their no fly list?
It's a common law country (except for Quebec, apparently) with a heritage very similar to the US. Economically & militarily it's perpetually coupled to the US. Canada isn't much different except that central government has a stronger role.
Yeah problem with tasking the TSA with busting people for carrying small amounts of drugs is because drugs are common and weapons are rare, and terrorists even rarer all they'll do then is look for drugs.
TSA doesn't give a shit about drugs - """anecdotal evidence repeated to a degree that makes it real data""" suggests that they put drugs through their fancy MS machines, inspect them visually in secondary screening, etc. and allow them to pass through. Being a presentable looking person might have something to do with it.
if they didnt bring their drugs kn the plane, the probably took them just before getting on, and are high by the time the airplane is taking off or once its at altitude.
'I know they have at least been screened for basic weapons.'
Bad assumption.
Flight crews, terminal restaurant workers and gift shop workers, and maintenance people who go through back gate get to avoid the theater. And even TSA walk around their own theater.
Who thinks bad people can't bribe or compel someone to carry a backpack around?
I agree completely about theater, but one note: I know a couple of people who have worked in airports (in food service), and all had to go through both a background check and normal security each day. I don’t believe for one moment that those measures are particularly effective, but airport service workers aren’t held to a different standard.
"crazy" people wouldn't be prevented from boarding, I'd argue that even high people shouldn't be stopped as we cannot predict the behavior of a high person, and we cannot let TSA evaluate craziness.
The entire point of the phrase "security theater" is to emphasize that there is no observable difference in outcomes. Ordinary people understand this, and criminals (especially the kinds that seize airplanes) are usually at least as smart as laypeople. Evaluating the success of the TSA based on perceived deterrents is at best an unknown unknown, but the fact that we know those deterrents to be ineffective makes the null hypothesis (it's just not that common to hijack planes anymore, potentially for other reasons) much more likely.
> Look into news reports from the 60s and 70s, before serious security at airports. Hijackings were almost normal. Today they are almost non-existent.
I would wager that this has more to do with the FAA requiring the reinforced and locked cockpit doors, and almost nothing to do with the TSA. The hijackings of the 1960s and 1970s were not done as acts of terror -- they were frequently "statement" actions, done with the goal of making the plane land somewhere troublesome for the US (like Cuba).
> I also appreciate the security theater because it makes airports a generally drug-free environment.
Do we go to the same airports? I regularly see daydrinking, mixing alcohol with sleep medications, and all kinds of behavior that adults generally do when they're in a space where they know their actions don't have real consequences for them. I'll go as far as to say that I've seen more open drug use (and consequent poor behavior) in airports than I've ever seen in the Port Authority in NYC. And I rode interstate buses for years.
Nope. Hijackings disappeared long before 9/11, when they started x-raying carry-ons in the 80s. No longer could just anyone bring an AK-47 on in a guitar case.
"As time went by, a series of skyjacking attempts – which in 1969 alone amounted to 40 in the US [ie one every week] – eventually led to the introduction of the first x-ray scanning machines for baggage in the 1970s. However, passengers themselves were only checked with an electronic magnetometer and later through metal detectors."
So that we're on the same page: the TSA was founded in 2001, as a response to 9/11. Nobody is saying that there shouldn't be any security at airports.
When people talk about the TSA's security theater, they typically mean:
1. Non-evidence-backed methodologies and screening requirements, such as the 3oz liquid limit and requiring passengers to remove their shoes (but only some of the time?)
2. Arbitrary "secondary screening" procedures and rampant pretextual justifications for screening selection (read: "looking too much like a terrorist")
3. Overdependence on questionably useful scanning technologies[1][2]. I chose millimeter wave scanners arbitrarily, but "backscatter" scanners have similar problems.
If x-raying luggage keeps people from bringing AK-47s onto airplanes, then we should continue to do that. But we can skip the rest of the theater and save some time and money in the process.
The TSA today is a federal agency, bundled into DHS. Before that there were plenty of people doing screenings at airports that, today, we would describe as TSA. The fact that they were employed by local agencies rather than the feds doesn't change the fact that they searched everyone in basically the same manner as today. I had my bags x-rayed and walked through metal detectors every time I flew in the 80s and 90s.
> The fact that they were employed by local agencies rather than the feds doesn't change the fact that they searched everyone in basically the same manner as today. I had my bags x-rayed and walked through metal detectors every time I flew in the 80s and 90s.
I don't think I would consider today's screening techniques "basically the same" as those in the 1980s and 1990s. My understanding is that the liquid limit, shoe removal, and use of largely ineffective personal scanning machines are all post-9/11 changes. All of that is a significant departure from having your bags scanned and walking through a single metal detector.
(More generally, this raises the question: if things are "basically the same" in your opinion between now and the 1990s, why weren't we able to stop 9/11?)
> I bet few here have ever spent much time on a bus. Not a short hop on a city bus, an overnight inter-state trip on a greyhound. I have a couple times and each time I would have PAID for a TSA-style check before boarding. It would weed out 99% of crazy/high people who make such journeys so miserable for everyone around them.
The high price of the flight is what weeds those folks out. People don't take an overnight Greyhound because they love sleeping with their neck at a 45 degree angle, or because they love watching the worst parts of New Jersey roll by in pitch darkness.
Some quick googling: a flight from LA to Chicago costs about 150$ one-way. A greyhound bust ticket for the same trip is 130$, plus paying for meals on a much longer journey.
You're not including opportunity cost: booking a flight means having a credit or debit card, having a method for getting to the airport, having documentation that gets you past security, and so forth. I suspect that these are disqualifying conditions for most people considering a $130 cross-country bus trip.
I just did a quick check on a few random dates, and I'm getting an average flight cost of about $500 one-way LAX to ORD, and $200 on a Greyhound. Not sure where you're getting your killer deal fares.
I can assure you, it's far more pleasant. Even if there is coach on the plane. They are waiting in a terminal, which sucks. I'm waiting until boarding begins in a real lounge with free booze and snacks.
It is not even close to the same. First class is expensive. No argument there. It isn't just a little better. It's an entirely different experience.
I took a lot of Greyhound trips in the later 1970s. The police did patrol Greyhound stations--I had a memorable wait in Detroit of three hours or so, during which I saw someone hauled out in handcuffs about every half hour. I met quite a few people on the bus that I would not care to associate with, some who didn't really seem sane, but none I can think of who made life miserable.
There was a baby on one bus who cried all the daylight hours and at least third of the dark hours for about 1200 miles, and he or she did make it hard to sleep. But I don't think a TSA-style check would have screened out the baby.
> Even continuing to pay them their entire salaries while eliminating their jobs would save money in the form of increased airport efficiency.
Like many pro-efficiency/anti-waste rants, yours ended up flying to close to the sun here.
If you eliminate the TSA you also eliminate the entity doing the random screenings. And random screenings do provide some security which is difficult to game.
Hell, random screenings even publicly signal their unpredictability by generating news stories about a famous presidential candidate being pulled out of the line for a random screening.
That's the only bona fide security feature I know about the TSA-- I'm not a security expert, so there may be others.
I would love a concrete study demonstrating the benefits of random screenings. Absent that, I'm not convinced that they are either beneficial or random.
Many Amtrak victims have been surprised to find their tickets are actually for bus journeys. Amtrak, incredibly, thinks of themselves more like a travel agency that happens to own some trains and buses, and not really as a rail operator.
If they start doing security lines for passengers they'll destroy about the only nice thing Amtrak had going for it: being a basic travel option that doesn't involve too much trouble. It's already expensive, slow, and has limited scheduling. The only upshot is that you can walk up 5 minutes before a train pulls in, buy a ticket and hop on without having to take your clothes off and disembowel your luggage.
I agree. These people have no sense for beauty, romance or joy. There's nothing quite like walking up to a classic train station like in Los Angeles or Santa Barbara and stepping right onto the train.
I swear the authorities who come up with this garbage have been trapped in a fluorescent dungeon for too many decades and forgot what life is about
The really dumb thing is we only started doing security for airplanes because the airplane itself can be used as a missile to hit another target. A train can't be used to hurt a third party. If someone wanted to attack a train they wouldn't need to get onboard at all. Simply wait along the track in the middle of nowhere. The whole idea is pointless.
There was the attempt by a train engineer to hit the USNS Mercy when it was docked in New York Harbor to assist with COVID19 treatments. He missed by quite a bit of distance.
All bureaucracies expand until stopped by an external force. Self-justification and perpetuation is in their very nature.
Politically, if you're anti-TSA you're not only anti-safety and pro-terrorism, you're against jobs for veterans (in reality, the bottom tier of veterans with no marketable skills and personality problems that make them unemployable in the private sector).
I guess in theory you could run a train into the station at the end of the line, which was the plot of the action/comedy Silver Streak staring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
Yea, this article isn't about that at all though. The article is about how the TSA has been crossreferencing amtrak passenger manifests with the do not fly list they maintain, and not letting people get on trains. This isn't about setting up security checkpoints.
I curious how long will it take to progress to a full blown social credit system like in China. Of course we would still call it democracy as it will eventually be private companies caring about your "safety".
I mean, Amtrak is pretty cool along the coasts. I'd much rather take it than almost anything else for getting between cities on the coasts. It's not great, but outside of just making the trains better/cheaper/run more often, it's not that much worse than a lot of the EU trains I've taken. You get on quickly and easily, and you get off at the destination with minimal disruption, in about the same time it would have taken to drive, but you don't have to do anything.
It's about the same speed as a Greyhound or slower, and costs twice as much or more. For the demographic that would most benefit from a good rail network, which is people without a lot of money, it fails to distinguish itself in any way other than being less dilapidated.
That definitely depends on the route/city though. There's plenty of routes where the train is a lot faster at otherwise high-traffic times of days.
Completely honest question - are trains in, say, Germany that much cheaper for going between cities? Most of the times I've considered traveling to a country where train travel is more common/normal, I've been surprised by how relatively expensive it is compared to my expectations.
Checking now, for Coach/Second Class Berlin to Frankfurt on a Friday is about 50 USD and NYC to Boston is 75. It's 50% more expensive on Amtrak, but neither is really "cheap", with both of them being about the same length of trip between similar sized cities. It's certainly not so cheap that "people without a lot of money" would be easily able to take that trip on a budget.
I had a look into this and the price difference between a train and a flight was about $4USD: $26USD vs $30USD. The flight was a lot cheaper than I expected, so much so that I'm genuinely suspicious of it. They were both a lot less than $50USD though.
This was for the 30th of April between Berlin and Frankfurt.
Some tips. Germans trying to save money will always book trains several weeks in advance because Sparpreis tickets can and will be 50% cheaper. Flixtrain is also a cheaper alternative that is quite popular.
Even so, $50 round trip is pretty pricey, especially since that's per-person.
I don't mean any of this to say I wouldn't love a better train system, just that it seems like more of the value of it is in realms other than its cost-effectiveness, even in countries with good infrastructure and investment in it.
I think we're missing the context of gas prices here. German gas prices are far higher than in the US, making train more cost-effective. We don't have cheap flights, except apparently Berlin-Frankfurt, so we can't rely on air travel the same way the US does. This overall makes train travel much more attractive in Germany. Then there are things like regional tickets, day tickets, BahnCard discounts, etc.
Amtrak service is fine, good even, in the places where they own the trackage and have right-of-way. But they own less than 1/4th of their tracks, and everywhere they don't is a place where they're given the lowest possible travel priority.
Given the right resources (more wholly-owned tracks and legislation requiring commercial railroads to honor Amtrak's timetables), Amtrak could be a pretty great national service.
If you can acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of the TSA's work is performative, it might be worth considering whether a similar principle applies to actual law enforcement agencies.
Just got back from a flight and the TSA was remarkably polite and efficient as was Delta Airlines. I do agree with the consensus of the majority of the comments here that the TSA has outlived their purpose.
I've dealt with some TSA agents that get their job done super fast and I zip right through. That's how I know they're doing absolutely nothing and just wasting tax dollars.
The fastest TSA agents I ever dealt with didn't care about belts, shoes, or anything. It was great. Apparently they were all involved in an illegal gambling ring.
TSA can only do this crap because people fall for the same damn "give us tons of power and we'll fix stuff" that they fell for last election cycle, and the one before that and the one before that and...
Everyone always imagines all the power going to the EPA or whatever their favorite pet agency is (the fact that we even have these de-facto lawmaking executive bureaucracies is a travesty for another day) but forgets that there's one TSA, one DEA, one ATF and one DHS for every EPA.
Honestly, as a European going to the us, it was shocking how bad the train system is. But I get it, places in the us are too far spread apart, so that it is more difficult to connect them.
If there are airport like security checks, even less people will use it. Good for the freight trains though, since they'll have the tracks to themselves.
I can't really comment on the article, since it bans EU visitors, but judging by comments here, I'm afraid the system will only get worse.
US trains were majorly useful and common way to travel before the 1960s. (Only a few miles dropped after WW2.) But in the early 1950s, a plan to build 41,000 miles of Interstate freeways appeared. And Eisenhower selected the Chairman of General Motors to be his Secretary of Defense. The plan was signed into law in 1956, and construction began. It was quite a boon to the auto industry.
By 1967 passenger train ridership had plummeted. Most people and a whole lot of freight shifted to the freeways and/or jetliners. Railroads could not compete. In 1952 there were 370 thousand miles of track. By 1992 that had dropped to 190 thousand miles.[0] Much track steel was recycled, and many rural railbeds became 'trailways'.
The thing is, a lot of this stuff happened in Europe too, at least qualitatively. Train operators were already unprofitable after WWI and were nationalized, and after WWII, funding and infrastructure were lacking and cars were seen as flexible, democratic and increasingly cheap. For example in the UK the famous name is the Beeching Axe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe).
I'd be very interested to see a comparative study of the US and Western (and Eastern) European countries' transport infrastructure in this period, but I've never found one.
> Good for the freight trains though, since they'll have the tracks to themselves.
Most of the tracks (in the west at least) are already owned by freight companies and Amtrak just squeezes in usage at their behest. It’s part of why Amtrak sucks as much as it does (no priority).
TSA screening in trains make much less sense than in planes. First, planes have a history of hijackings -- trains much less so. Second, TSA got implemented on planes after a very salient failure: 9/11. What's the equivalent for trains? Finally, whatever threat vector could compromise a train could do so in so many different situations: buses, commuter rail, large crowds, etc. Is TSA going to cover those next?
It's so ridiculous that I can't help but think cynically of it: either TSA is doing the bureaucratic thing of expanding as much as it can, or some really good airplane lobbyist finally got their payday.
So while there isn't nearly as much history for train hijackings they did happen, and I'm sure there will be more in the future. But that doesn't justify the kind of security theater that the TSA goes in for.
> TSA screening in trains make much less sense than in planes. First, planes have a history of hijackings
Not to mention that the most important measures protecting against this have nothing to do with the TSA. 9/11 Changed completely the way passengers and crew see hijacking. It used to be that hijackers had demands, not suicide missions. Anyone trying to do it now will face a planeful of people fighting them like their lives depend on it, not to mention a locked, reinforced cockpit door. Attacks on planes are stopped either before they ever make it the airport, as with the plot that made them ban liquids, or after they're in the air, as with the undewear- and shoe-bombers.
To add to that, I expect hijacking a plane means the very real risk of a military jet being sent to shoot the plane down, especially if it's flying toward populated areas.
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Not only because (as several folks suggested) that "hijacking" a train is absurd on its face (although this[0] -- and not the garbage remake comes to mind), but especially because all someone has to do is drive a car (or even "better", a fully loaded 18-wheeler) onto the train tracks on the far side of a curve and blammo.
Or, more dramatically, a bomb on a railroad trestle (or just on a track) moments before a train is to arrive (there are, you know, schedules and stuff) would have a similar effect.
The whole idea is absurd security theater that needs to be killed with fire.
So unless all car purchasers/renters are also screened for "terrorist" impulses, you can't stop folks from wrecking trains.
I wonder what the overlap is between people calling the TSA useless security theater that's a violation of rights and the ones who say "what's the big deal about mask and vaccine mandates? It's to keep us safe, stop whining about 'mah freedoms' and grow up like they do in collectivist Asian cultures!"
The last time I tried to take Amtrak, from Seattle to Vancouver, shortly before covid19 started... It arrived 3+ hours late at 1:20 in the morning, so late that the Vancouver metro system (skytrain )was already shut down, and I ended up taking an additional $90 taxi ride.
It was overall quite a miserable experience compared to just using my own car. And the return trip ticket cost was actually more than gas+mileage expenses on an ordinary economy car.
That's a beautiful route, especially if you are on the west facing side of the train but it sounds like it was dark most of your trip. Quite the pity because during the day the view makes up for the slowness of the trip.
I believe the main reason for the terrible on-time record of Amtrak has to do with prioritizing freight rail over passenger rail as they have to use the same lines.
Seattle to Vancouver is a 2.5 hour drive (if you don't count the time spent at the border checkpoint -- but even that is a 5 minute affair if you have NEXUS).
Whereas crossing the border by train is miserable because CBSA/CBP have to clear everyone on the train. I once took the train from Toronto to NYC (nominally a 12.5 hour trip). We were stuck the border for 2.5 hours (a bunch of passengers had to go through secondary inspection), which made it a 15 hour trip. I could've flown it in 1.5 hrs total.
Lesson: never try to cross a national border by train. We're not Europe -- we have neither a Schengen-like agreement or pre-clearance for trains like we do for airports. Though we theoretically could have pre-clearance for trains (there have been efforts [1])
210 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadThe entire interview is gold.
I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.
Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!
Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?
A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
- Cab Dolowicz
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072251/characters/nm0670017
Yeah, me neither.
I'm being only a little hyperbolic here. TSA can only do this crap because they have authority to do this crap and they only have that authority because congress lets them because people let them because people keep falling for the same old dumb lies.
Or just give them the money no strings attached.
[1] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Toilet_Safety_Administrati...
However, it is potentially the first step in a slippery slope that leads to that kind of screening.
If such invasive screenings are implemented it will impact the already dismal commercial appeal of intercity train travel in USA.
Highly effective, indeed[1]. The US would probably be better off dropping the pretense and paying the 55,000 employees of the TSA to do nearly anything else instead. Even continuing to pay them their entire salaries while eliminating their jobs would save money in the form of increased airport efficiency.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-s...
Biden is famously pro-rail and I think this is just a way of killing off rail before he has a chance to fund a bunch of construction and equipment. Which is sad, because our federal highway system is crumbling in decay because we way, way overbuilt it.
It's all moot. No matter how much security there is, no matter how badly intelligence services or political leaders fuck up (in the case of 9/11, it was political leadership. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, it was intelligence), they'll just shout that they need more surveillance, more security measures, more rules. Nobody will ever say "no, you intelligence people need to do your job properly."
When I lived near Dulles airport I frequently used the train to travel up the north east as far as NY or Boston-- even though the train was often more expensive. The fact that I didn't have to deal with the TSA and their intrusive searches was a significant part of that. From the article it sounds like they're only currently planning to quietly invade your privacy in the background, which might not the rail killing effect you are concerned with. But if they did go full airport-tsa style handling of the trains then I wouldn't be shocked if it killed passenger rail: Not dealing with the TSA may not be a reason for most passengers, but it only has to be a reason for enough to bring it under a threshold of viability.
3 in 70 is between 1/23 and 1/24, but really how many significant digits does this study get to. Surely 1/25 is accurate enough.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/01/politics/tsa-failed-undercove...
[2]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/reassessing_a...
> "On March 24, 2015, the co-pilot of a German airliner deliberately flew the plane into the French Alps, killing himself and the other 149 people onboard. When it crashed, Germanwings flight 9525 had been traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany. (history.com)"
I believe there's now a strict rule of two pilots in the cockpit at all times as a result. Also, hijacked planes are now much more likely to be shot down by military jets if they approach urban areas, which is not a topic airlines like to discuss.
Not sure of the veracity, but I know pilot Suicide was one of the major theories held by investigators in both cases.
Also maybe let's stop firing them for getting mental healthcare.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/opre.49.2.181...
People hear radiation and lose rationality because of the fear mongering in the 50s and beyond.
Probably not, but only because "That's silly, bananas are just fruit!" rather than because of any scientific study I've seen or done. So you really shouldn't listen to me.
Just because of where the article is listed, I've always just assumed it to be crackpottery.
All potassium is always radioactive. Unless your have a gas centrifuge facility next to your greenhouse, all your bananas are always radioactive.
While practically true, this is sufficiently imprecise to bother the more pedantic variety of nerd; for accuracy I therefore quote the relevant section of Wikipedia (a resource we should give daily thanks for):
"Naturally occurring potassium is composed of three isotopes, of which potassium-40 is radioactive. Traces of potassium-40 are found in all potassium, and it is the most common radioisotope in the human body."
While driving is safe, it's also a lot more dangerous than flying. So pushing people towards driving miles instead of flying iles also should have been a source of mortality in your analysis-- too bad that one is harder to assess. Since for many trips driving is often not a reasonable alternative there probably wouldn't be that many-- but again, it wouldn't take much to overcome any arguable benefit of the TSA.
And, of course, the enormous resources that go into the TSA could be instead funneled into actual lifesaving activities.
It’s a drip for everyone but there are many more drips available where that came from.
The methods used by Israel and by USA (the USA methods being imitated by most other countries) for checking the flight passengers did not have any resemblance.
After 2001, Israel did not make any change in their procedures, because there was no reason, their procedures were much better than what was invented then in USA.
While USA has relied on spending much money on improved machines for scanning people and luggage and in harassing the passengers with things like taking off the shoes, Israel did not rely on machines, but on ancient low-tech methods, i.e. well-trained professionals who questioned the passengers.
The main test that you had to pass to be allowed boarding were 2 separate discussions with 2 Israeli security agents, to whom you had to explain the purpose of your flight. The 2 agents asked mostly the same questions, but with various variations in content and order, so you had to tell convincingly the same story twice.
From the point of view of the traveler, the disadvantage of the Israeli method was that it was slow, a lot of time was needed for the discussions with the agents.
Nevertheless, I prefer that method, because it was much less stressful for me than having to do a lot of unpacking, then undressing, and then dressing, and then packing, while having to be very careful to not have something lost or stolen (I usually travel with a very large number of electronic devices, many of them small and easy to loose; I have also seen once how the laptop of another traveler was successfully stolen before entering the scanning machine, without anyone noticing how; I do not know whether the thief could have been identified later, from the security camera recordings).
In many hundreds of flights with El Al, I was subjected to a body search only once, while on the airlines embracing the USA model, many travelers now do not remember any more the times when they did not have to pass through a body and personal luggage security check.
The only one case when I had to pass through a body search was because I happened too be extremely tired and I wished that the discussions would pass faster, but of course, my noticeable haste had the opposite effect.
The flight was late in the evening and all the day I had been extremely busy. I had literally run through the city the entire day, to complete various errands in time from the flight. After much effort, I had succeeded to reach the airport just in time, but I was exhausted and I just wanted to reach the airplane ASAP, to finally be able to rest.
However, the security agents noticed that I seem to be in a hurry, and they thought that this is suspicious. Therefore I had to also pass through the body search, but like I have said, they did not do such searches on everyone, but only when they had grounds for suspicion.
/s
I also appreciate the security theater because it makes airports a generally drug-free environment. I bet few here have ever spent much time on a bus. Not a short hop on a city bus, an overnight inter-state trip on a greyhound. I have a couple times and each time I would have PAID for a TSA-style check before boarding. It would weed out 99% of crazy/high people who make such journeys so miserable for everyone around them.
A typical long trip by bus, without the TSA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mwOYroU7bk
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...
If I was a terrorist looking to bring a bomb onto a plane, I would probably also build it to sneak past security checks. Isn't that the point?
https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/10/13/tsa-firea...
>> By October 3rd of this year, TSA officers had stopped 4,495 airline passengers from carrying firearms onto their flights, surpassing the previous record of 4,432 firearms caught at checkpoints in the full calendar year 2019
I'd really like to understand the TSA's scenario, it looks like another massive and pointless waste of money added to what that the organization already does in airports.
The actual items under dispute are: (1) what is the TSA's domain (anti-terrorism? catching personal amounts of drugs? guns?), and (2) why should we put up with all of the theater that isn't making us any safer?
Most Americans don’t even know the names of their representatives. Improving the public’s ability to petition its officials is something we should try before completely giving up.
I think hijackings are over because everyone now knows that if you pull a knife or a gun on an airport, you will immediately get taken down by literally everyone on the flight. People before 9/11 didn't realize the downside risk of a hijacking was a suicide crash. It was just unthinkable. Now that we know, it will never happen again. TSA is not a factor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean
Also your example is from Canada where there is no TSA yet people don't do similar things on planes, it's not an ideal example.
You really think that Canada doesn't have a TSA? They do. It is even called the CATSA, ie the CAnadian TSA. In fact, to comply pre-screening, CATSA is largely forced to mirror all US TSA rules. Literally the only difference between Canadian and American screening procedures is the colour of the uniforms.
https://www.catsa-acsta.gc.ca/en/about-us
Bad assumption.
Flight crews, terminal restaurant workers and gift shop workers, and maintenance people who go through back gate get to avoid the theater. And even TSA walk around their own theater.
Who thinks bad people can't bribe or compel someone to carry a backpack around?
> Look into news reports from the 60s and 70s, before serious security at airports. Hijackings were almost normal. Today they are almost non-existent.
I would wager that this has more to do with the FAA requiring the reinforced and locked cockpit doors, and almost nothing to do with the TSA. The hijackings of the 1960s and 1970s were not done as acts of terror -- they were frequently "statement" actions, done with the goal of making the plane land somewhere troublesome for the US (like Cuba).
> I also appreciate the security theater because it makes airports a generally drug-free environment.
Do we go to the same airports? I regularly see daydrinking, mixing alcohol with sleep medications, and all kinds of behavior that adults generally do when they're in a space where they know their actions don't have real consequences for them. I'll go as far as to say that I've seen more open drug use (and consequent poor behavior) in airports than I've ever seen in the Port Authority in NYC. And I rode interstate buses for years.
Nope. Hijackings disappeared long before 9/11, when they started x-raying carry-ons in the 80s. No longer could just anyone bring an AK-47 on in a guitar case.
https://airport.nridigital.com/air_mar20/timeline_the_histor...
"As time went by, a series of skyjacking attempts – which in 1969 alone amounted to 40 in the US [ie one every week] – eventually led to the introduction of the first x-ray scanning machines for baggage in the 1970s. However, passengers themselves were only checked with an electronic magnetometer and later through metal detectors."
When people talk about the TSA's security theater, they typically mean:
1. Non-evidence-backed methodologies and screening requirements, such as the 3oz liquid limit and requiring passengers to remove their shoes (but only some of the time?)
2. Arbitrary "secondary screening" procedures and rampant pretextual justifications for screening selection (read: "looking too much like a terrorist")
3. Overdependence on questionably useful scanning technologies[1][2]. I chose millimeter wave scanners arbitrarily, but "backscatter" scanners have similar problems.
If x-raying luggage keeps people from bringing AK-47s onto airplanes, then we should continue to do that. But we can skip the rest of the theater and save some time and money in the process.
[1]: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/tsa-agent-slips-through-df...
[2]: https://www.propublica.org/article/sweating-bullets-body-sca...
I don't think I would consider today's screening techniques "basically the same" as those in the 1980s and 1990s. My understanding is that the liquid limit, shoe removal, and use of largely ineffective personal scanning machines are all post-9/11 changes. All of that is a significant departure from having your bags scanned and walking through a single metal detector.
(More generally, this raises the question: if things are "basically the same" in your opinion between now and the 1990s, why weren't we able to stop 9/11?)
The US variant of the Gregorian calendar sounds wild!
The high price of the flight is what weeds those folks out. People don't take an overnight Greyhound because they love sleeping with their neck at a 45 degree angle, or because they love watching the worst parts of New Jersey roll by in pitch darkness.
It is not even close to the same. First class is expensive. No argument there. It isn't just a little better. It's an entirely different experience.
What you have there is an "America" problem, not a "Bus" problem.
There was a baby on one bus who cried all the daylight hours and at least third of the dark hours for about 1200 miles, and he or she did make it hard to sleep. But I don't think a TSA-style check would have screened out the baby.
[edit: duration of stop in Detroit]
Like many pro-efficiency/anti-waste rants, yours ended up flying to close to the sun here.
If you eliminate the TSA you also eliminate the entity doing the random screenings. And random screenings do provide some security which is difficult to game.
Hell, random screenings even publicly signal their unpredictability by generating news stories about a famous presidential candidate being pulled out of the line for a random screening.
That's the only bona fide security feature I know about the TSA-- I'm not a security expert, so there may be others.
- reinforced cockpit doors - passengers now actively resist hijackers
Everything else is security theater.
I can. Make them ride the bus instead.
I haven't experienced that on the train. And I have on the bus. An accident on the road and you're not going anywhere until it's cleared.
What's more, have you even ridden on stank Greyhound or Trailways bus? Yuck. I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears.
I swear the authorities who come up with this garbage have been trapped in a fluorescent dungeon for too many decades and forgot what life is about
That seems to be a bit of a meme in plenty of western movies.
Edit: Los Angeles, not New York.
may be that story? that says LA though, not New York.
Politically, if you're anti-TSA you're not only anti-safety and pro-terrorism, you're against jobs for veterans (in reality, the bottom tier of veterans with no marketable skills and personality problems that make them unemployable in the private sector).
Thank you for reading the article.
> This isn't about setting up security checkpoints.
However, all I have to say is: "yet."
Completely honest question - are trains in, say, Germany that much cheaper for going between cities? Most of the times I've considered traveling to a country where train travel is more common/normal, I've been surprised by how relatively expensive it is compared to my expectations.
Checking now, for Coach/Second Class Berlin to Frankfurt on a Friday is about 50 USD and NYC to Boston is 75. It's 50% more expensive on Amtrak, but neither is really "cheap", with both of them being about the same length of trip between similar sized cities. It's certainly not so cheap that "people without a lot of money" would be easily able to take that trip on a budget.
This was for the 30th of April between Berlin and Frankfurt.
I don't mean any of this to say I wouldn't love a better train system, just that it seems like more of the value of it is in realms other than its cost-effectiveness, even in countries with good infrastructure and investment in it.
Given the right resources (more wholly-owned tracks and legislation requiring commercial railroads to honor Amtrak's timetables), Amtrak could be a pretty great national service.
The fastest TSA agents I ever dealt with didn't care about belts, shoes, or anything. It was great. Apparently they were all involved in an illegal gambling ring.
Everyone always imagines all the power going to the EPA or whatever their favorite pet agency is (the fact that we even have these de-facto lawmaking executive bureaucracies is a travesty for another day) but forgets that there's one TSA, one DEA, one ATF and one DHS for every EPA.
Honestly, as a European going to the us, it was shocking how bad the train system is. But I get it, places in the us are too far spread apart, so that it is more difficult to connect them.
If there are airport like security checks, even less people will use it. Good for the freight trains though, since they'll have the tracks to themselves.
I can't really comment on the article, since it bans EU visitors, but judging by comments here, I'm afraid the system will only get worse.
By 1967 passenger train ridership had plummeted. Most people and a whole lot of freight shifted to the freeways and/or jetliners. Railroads could not compete. In 1952 there were 370 thousand miles of track. By 1992 that had dropped to 190 thousand miles.[0] Much track steel was recycled, and many rural railbeds became 'trailways'.
[0]https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/railroad_route_miles...
I'd be very interested to see a comparative study of the US and Western (and Eastern) European countries' transport infrastructure in this period, but I've never found one.
Most of the tracks (in the west at least) are already owned by freight companies and Amtrak just squeezes in usage at their behest. It’s part of why Amtrak sucks as much as it does (no priority).
Is this an intranet?
It's so ridiculous that I can't help but think cynically of it: either TSA is doing the bureaucratic thing of expanding as much as it can, or some really good airplane lobbyist finally got their payday.
"What if they were laying the tracks during the night - and, God forbid, ran a train into the White House?"
https://youtu.be/fNfSQA6ZRsc
The whole interview is genius.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_T...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MYxAlA5wuk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Dutch_train_hijacking
There was an attack on the Thalys not all that long ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Thalys_train_attack
and another attempted attack
https://www.voanews.com/a/europe_americans-who-foiled-attemp...
So while there isn't nearly as much history for train hijackings they did happen, and I'm sure there will be more in the future. But that doesn't justify the kind of security theater that the TSA goes in for.
Not to mention that the most important measures protecting against this have nothing to do with the TSA. 9/11 Changed completely the way passengers and crew see hijacking. It used to be that hijackers had demands, not suicide missions. Anyone trying to do it now will face a planeful of people fighting them like their lives depend on it, not to mention a locked, reinforced cockpit door. Attacks on planes are stopped either before they ever make it the airport, as with the plot that made them ban liquids, or after they're in the air, as with the undewear- and shoe-bombers.
"Welcome to Seaview Estates, a Safer Neighborhood(tm) by Amazon & in cooperation with the TSA.
We are proud of our award winning public transit connections. Our security officers will conduct quick, minimally invasive searches of all residents, visitors, pets and vehicles when leaving your house, and upon returning to a Safer Neighborhood.
Please note that delays should be expected when entering a Safer Neighborhood, so you should arrive early to clear our screening process.
All liquids, gels and powders should be in transparent containers of no more than 2 ounces, unless from a Safer Neighborhood certified vendor. Did you know that all products purchased through Amazon Prime are pre-certified?"
Not only because (as several folks suggested) that "hijacking" a train is absurd on its face (although this[0] -- and not the garbage remake comes to mind), but especially because all someone has to do is drive a car (or even "better", a fully loaded 18-wheeler) onto the train tracks on the far side of a curve and blammo.
Or, more dramatically, a bomb on a railroad trestle (or just on a track) moments before a train is to arrive (there are, you know, schedules and stuff) would have a similar effect.
The whole idea is absurd security theater that needs to be killed with fire.
So unless all car purchasers/renters are also screened for "terrorist" impulses, you can't stop folks from wrecking trains.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_T...
Edit: Added the missing link.
It was overall quite a miserable experience compared to just using my own car. And the return trip ticket cost was actually more than gas+mileage expenses on an ordinary economy car.
Whereas crossing the border by train is miserable because CBSA/CBP have to clear everyone on the train. I once took the train from Toronto to NYC (nominally a 12.5 hour trip). We were stuck the border for 2.5 hours (a bunch of passengers had to go through secondary inspection), which made it a 15 hour trip. I could've flown it in 1.5 hrs total.
Lesson: never try to cross a national border by train. We're not Europe -- we have neither a Schengen-like agreement or pre-clearance for trains like we do for airports. Though we theoretically could have pre-clearance for trains (there have been efforts [1])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_border_precleara...
This is why people fight against vaccine mandates and I’m about to join them.