"Or you can just walk into a train station with a suitcase full of explosives, find a packed crowd, walk away, and detonate. Killing hundreds of train travelers would be a cake walk for any motivated terrorist."
The same is true of U.S. airports -- the packed crowd is the security line. By creating this vulnerable packed crowd, our airport security system is endangering us as much as it is protecting us. But people are reassured by the security theater, and TSA and its unions would fight like hell to protect their turf, so I assume this criminal stupidity will last until the end of time (or at least the end of my traveling time).
This reminds me of Afghanistan & Iraq. It seemed like every time you read about a suicide bombing with a large number of casualties like >20, it was because the bomber attacked a long line. A long line? Somewhere as dangerous as *there*, places which were, well, routinely suffering suicide bombing attacks killing >20 people? Why, was it an Ariana Grande concert or something? No. It would usually be a... security checkpoint or police station.
Which also echoes Caplan's point about the irony: the security measures here can be maximally destructive because if the activity they were obstructing were not *so* valuable, no one would be trying in the first place. They can get away with making air travel such a misery for everyone only because air travel is *so* valuable that they are unable to make the cost of security & everything else so high as to make you prefer to drive or not take the trip. (I'm heading to Las Vegas tomorrow, and while I don't relish the idea of a guy groping my nuts again like my last flight, I relish the idea of spending several days driving all the way to Las Vegas & back even less; so if that's my choice - which it is - then 'lie back and think of England'.)
Pure honest question, as I have no specific knowledge of these incidents:
How many security checkpoint suicide bombings have been by people hoping to get to a school or something, detonating early the moment it became clear that they were going to be caught?
That's my thought too. The security theater just moves the problem around a bit, it doesn't actually fix any of it, and at great cost in time, money and aggravation.
The problem with air travel isn't as much security as scheduling fragility.
I fly a lot, and getting through security is basically a non-issue. I don't think it took more than 15 minutes on any of the latest series of trips I took. Sure, that's probably 15 minutes too long, but the real "hell" of air travel on my last trip came when:
1. trying to leave a day early cost me (and each of my colleagues) hours of negotiating and wheedling on websites and on the phone to not pay an arm and a leg extra.
2. Getting to the airport and getting checked in for your Tokyo to NYC to Home travel, and told that your connecting flight (NYC to home) was cancelled.
3. Getting automatically rebooked to Tokyo to NYC to San Francisco to Home, with a 12 hour layover in San Francisco. WTF!
4. Having to spend almost an hour figuring out how to change that to something sensible, like just going straight from Tokyo to San Francisco, then home. That was more sensible, but it still got me home 12 hours later and left me to sit around an airport all day.
5. So, when I landed in San Francisco, I looked at my options again, and saw, hey, I could avoid the layover, fly to Denver, and then on to home and get there at about the original time I would have gotten him. Cool! Except it took more time and stress.
6. So I get on the plane to Denver, and midway through they announce that due to weather, they have to divert the plane to Grand Junction, Colorado.
7. They don't have enough fuel to outlast the weather in Denver. But ironically, they have too much to safely land in Grand Junction, so we have to spend some time flying in circles to burn off that excess fuel. Again, more delay.
8. We land, and are stuck in the plane for a while while it refules.
9. Then, we have further delay in taking off, and some more waiting for the weather to clear in Denver. 10. When we finally land, my scheduled plane home has already departed. I have to pay for a hotel and stay in Denver. I'm rebooked on a flight that leaves at 930AM and goes straight home in the morning.
11. I get to the airport (again, quickly through security), and I'm sitting at my gate, ready to go, when the flight home is cancelled because the plane has a "technical problem". They rebook me on a flight to Chicago and then a second flight on to home. This involves more waiting (flight to Chicago leaves at 11am, and then a 3.5 hour layover in Chicago), so I finally get home at about 9PM Saturday. This is an hour earlier than I would have gotten home if I'd never changed my flight back in step 1, but involved an extra 24 hours of travel to accomplish.
Reminds me of a time I was going to China on short notice. I had to go to Beijing and Wuhan, so could fly into either city. What I found was that the cheapest ticket to Beijing flew through Wuhan and the cheapest ticket to Wuhan flew through Beijing. So I ended up with a superfluous layover in order to save money.
In Israel there is security for the Train. It consists of putting your bags through an x-ray machine, and walking through a not very sensitive metal detector. Altogether it takes about 30 seconds. It seems like you could do the same on a plane for most of the benefit at a fraction of the cost.
This is pretty much how I understand pre-9/11 security used to work, except that was before cockpit doors were reinforced so there were regular hostage situations and plane jackings. Seems worth trying again: the security theater makes me anxious/stressed/irritable instead of being reassuring and I can't be the only one.
Well, trains can stop anywhere along the route and people can jump out of the emergency exits. In a plane you are locked into the aluminum tube until it ends up on the ground somehow. A tiny bomb on the plane probably kills everyone, while a tiny bomb on a train would be unpleasant but likely survivable for most people on the train.
Is it rational? Probably not, but people are much more afraid of being in aluminum tubes in the sky than they are of steel tubes on the ground.
Yeah, this is part of the problem. Though I also think everyone is focusing too much on the idea of bombings or suicide attacks designed to carry out a maximal civilian body count in peacetime. I mean, yes, there's a certain number of suicidal psychopathic nihilists in the world, but really not that many, and dissuading them from one avenue of attack might just motivate them to pursue another (granted, another 9/11-style attack would be an order of magnitude deadlier than anything else they might realistically try).
Aircraft security was originally implemented not to prevent this sort of attack but to prevent hijackings, which were actually a very rational tactic at their peak, with the perpetrators typically surviving and often securing concessions from their enemies.
I guess we could argue that this wouldn't play out again in today's environment, but it's understandable that no one wants to take the risk.
Absolutely agree- I was in no way trying to justify the TSA regime. Although some degree of minimal airplane security is probably prudent (or unavoidable in a public choice theory context), if for nothing else than to make the opportunity cost >0 for any nefarious types.
The irrationality of public--and thus, governmental--response to the terrorist threat prompts the question: Do you really expect the governmental treatment of global warming/climate change to be at all sensible? (If the public--and thus the government--ever discovers the "existential" risk of AGI, look out!)
Indeed. One astounding underreaction is to the well-established, substantial health consequences of fossil fuels via air quality, by people advocating cleaner energy on climate change grounds. Why are they so often leaving that huge weapon on the floor of the debate arena? Apparently, just because effects of accelerated aging of lungs across a huge population is a much less sexy story than monster hurricanes.
193 (72%) of those fatalities in train terrorist attacks happened in one single event, namely the Madrid 3/11/2004 terrorist attack (Spain's 9/11). The terrorists exploded 10 bombs in 4 different trains to achieve their cruel goal. The second biggest (after Lockerbie) terrorist attack on European soil to date.
> And while regulators are awful enough to cavalierly torment every traveler in their jurisdiction, they aren’t awful enough to destroy the very industry they tyrannize over.
Yes, it's true that quickly implementing airport-level security at rail stations isn't going to happen, but we didn't get to the current level of airport-screenings in one step either. Death by a thousand cuts gives regulators plausible deniability (even to their own conscience).
Sure, I'd like train-freedom on a plane. But getting to watch the world from the window of a plane still vastly outweighs the indignities of airports and such. The aesthetic wonders of air travel (if you get to look at a window) remain incredible.
It is possible that you have preferences on the tail of the distribution :)
I like the actual flying part too, but all the stuff surrounding it is pretty awful, enough so that I would rather drive for work travel anywhere under 6-8 hours away. It makes for a shorter trip.
On Scottish trains there is a irritating "if you see something that doesn't look right, contact the British transport police. See it. Say it. Sort it". playing over the loudspeakers quite a lot.
Oh and sometimes you do need to present a ticket to the automatic ticket gates to get on. Other times you don't.
This is the same reason why COVID related requirements were so much more stringent for international air travelers to the US compared to international land border crossers. Also the reason air arrivals pay a CBP fee that land arrivals don't. Governments impose restrictions on air travel because they can.
Train tickets within Europe are more expensive (often twice the price)
Caveat of caveat:
There are some hidden costs:
with the train you arrive in the city centre (where most often you want to be), with an airplane you have to travel from the airport to the city centre which costs time and money (and sometimes a ridiculous amount of money compared to regular public transport). This takes off some of the price difference.
Travel time for both modes of transport is about the same.
You can just hop on and off a train, whereas when one is flying, you have to go the airport, arrive two hours in advance and at the end it takes at least an hour or so to collect your luggage. And then you have to travel to the city centre*.
Conclusion: Train travel is as fast, but more expensive.
And , like Bryan says: much more pleasant.
* Being Dutch, a short commercial break:
From airport to city centre of Amsterdam is only 20 minutes by train (leaving 6 times per hour), paying the regular train fare.
Amen. I just got done flying from the US to London and it was so annoying. On the flip side, train travel in England is so easy and convenient.
We tell our kids about the 'good ole days' in the US when your friends could go with you to the gate and see you off (or be there to greet you when you arrived!), and you could arrive at the airport 20 minutes before your flight departed.
Perhaps the newer the technology, the stricter the security put into place. We seem to accept risks in activities that have been around for a generation or more, but expect anything "new" to be perfectly safe.
"Or you can just walk into a train station with a suitcase full of explosives, find a packed crowd, walk away, and detonate. Killing hundreds of train travelers would be a cake walk for any motivated terrorist."
The same is true of U.S. airports -- the packed crowd is the security line. By creating this vulnerable packed crowd, our airport security system is endangering us as much as it is protecting us. But people are reassured by the security theater, and TSA and its unions would fight like hell to protect their turf, so I assume this criminal stupidity will last until the end of time (or at least the end of my traveling time).
This reminds me of Afghanistan & Iraq. It seemed like every time you read about a suicide bombing with a large number of casualties like >20, it was because the bomber attacked a long line. A long line? Somewhere as dangerous as *there*, places which were, well, routinely suffering suicide bombing attacks killing >20 people? Why, was it an Ariana Grande concert or something? No. It would usually be a... security checkpoint or police station.
Which also echoes Caplan's point about the irony: the security measures here can be maximally destructive because if the activity they were obstructing were not *so* valuable, no one would be trying in the first place. They can get away with making air travel such a misery for everyone only because air travel is *so* valuable that they are unable to make the cost of security & everything else so high as to make you prefer to drive or not take the trip. (I'm heading to Las Vegas tomorrow, and while I don't relish the idea of a guy groping my nuts again like my last flight, I relish the idea of spending several days driving all the way to Las Vegas & back even less; so if that's my choice - which it is - then 'lie back and think of England'.)
Are you coming to the DefCon LW meetup (5-7pm in the Caesars Forum Food Court today)?
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fcXYyyRvdAmLHWECa/lw-meetup-defcon-las-vegas-5-7pm-thu-aug-11-at-forum-food
Pure honest question, as I have no specific knowledge of these incidents:
How many security checkpoint suicide bombings have been by people hoping to get to a school or something, detonating early the moment it became clear that they were going to be caught?
That's my thought too. The security theater just moves the problem around a bit, it doesn't actually fix any of it, and at great cost in time, money and aggravation.
The problem with air travel isn't as much security as scheduling fragility.
I fly a lot, and getting through security is basically a non-issue. I don't think it took more than 15 minutes on any of the latest series of trips I took. Sure, that's probably 15 minutes too long, but the real "hell" of air travel on my last trip came when:
1. trying to leave a day early cost me (and each of my colleagues) hours of negotiating and wheedling on websites and on the phone to not pay an arm and a leg extra.
2. Getting to the airport and getting checked in for your Tokyo to NYC to Home travel, and told that your connecting flight (NYC to home) was cancelled.
3. Getting automatically rebooked to Tokyo to NYC to San Francisco to Home, with a 12 hour layover in San Francisco. WTF!
4. Having to spend almost an hour figuring out how to change that to something sensible, like just going straight from Tokyo to San Francisco, then home. That was more sensible, but it still got me home 12 hours later and left me to sit around an airport all day.
5. So, when I landed in San Francisco, I looked at my options again, and saw, hey, I could avoid the layover, fly to Denver, and then on to home and get there at about the original time I would have gotten him. Cool! Except it took more time and stress.
6. So I get on the plane to Denver, and midway through they announce that due to weather, they have to divert the plane to Grand Junction, Colorado.
7. They don't have enough fuel to outlast the weather in Denver. But ironically, they have too much to safely land in Grand Junction, so we have to spend some time flying in circles to burn off that excess fuel. Again, more delay.
8. We land, and are stuck in the plane for a while while it refules.
9. Then, we have further delay in taking off, and some more waiting for the weather to clear in Denver. 10. When we finally land, my scheduled plane home has already departed. I have to pay for a hotel and stay in Denver. I'm rebooked on a flight that leaves at 930AM and goes straight home in the morning.
11. I get to the airport (again, quickly through security), and I'm sitting at my gate, ready to go, when the flight home is cancelled because the plane has a "technical problem". They rebook me on a flight to Chicago and then a second flight on to home. This involves more waiting (flight to Chicago leaves at 11am, and then a 3.5 hour layover in Chicago), so I finally get home at about 9PM Saturday. This is an hour earlier than I would have gotten home if I'd never changed my flight back in step 1, but involved an extra 24 hours of travel to accomplish.
And that, folks, is why Air travel is hell.
Reminds me of a time I was going to China on short notice. I had to go to Beijing and Wuhan, so could fly into either city. What I found was that the cheapest ticket to Beijing flew through Wuhan and the cheapest ticket to Wuhan flew through Beijing. So I ended up with a superfluous layover in order to save money.
In Israel there is security for the Train. It consists of putting your bags through an x-ray machine, and walking through a not very sensitive metal detector. Altogether it takes about 30 seconds. It seems like you could do the same on a plane for most of the benefit at a fraction of the cost.
This is pretty much how I understand pre-9/11 security used to work, except that was before cockpit doors were reinforced so there were regular hostage situations and plane jackings. Seems worth trying again: the security theater makes me anxious/stressed/irritable instead of being reassuring and I can't be the only one.
Amen. The number of person-hours lost to airplane security must be astronomical, by the way.
Well, trains can stop anywhere along the route and people can jump out of the emergency exits. In a plane you are locked into the aluminum tube until it ends up on the ground somehow. A tiny bomb on the plane probably kills everyone, while a tiny bomb on a train would be unpleasant but likely survivable for most people on the train.
Is it rational? Probably not, but people are much more afraid of being in aluminum tubes in the sky than they are of steel tubes on the ground.
Yeah, this is part of the problem. Though I also think everyone is focusing too much on the idea of bombings or suicide attacks designed to carry out a maximal civilian body count in peacetime. I mean, yes, there's a certain number of suicidal psychopathic nihilists in the world, but really not that many, and dissuading them from one avenue of attack might just motivate them to pursue another (granted, another 9/11-style attack would be an order of magnitude deadlier than anything else they might realistically try).
Aircraft security was originally implemented not to prevent this sort of attack but to prevent hijackings, which were actually a very rational tactic at their peak, with the perpetrators typically surviving and often securing concessions from their enemies.
I guess we could argue that this wouldn't play out again in today's environment, but it's understandable that no one wants to take the risk.
Absolutely agree- I was in no way trying to justify the TSA regime. Although some degree of minimal airplane security is probably prudent (or unavoidable in a public choice theory context), if for nothing else than to make the opportunity cost >0 for any nefarious types.
The irrationality of public--and thus, governmental--response to the terrorist threat prompts the question: Do you really expect the governmental treatment of global warming/climate change to be at all sensible? (If the public--and thus the government--ever discovers the "existential" risk of AGI, look out!)
I mean, it's *not* at all sensible. But non-sensibility comes in several varieties - both overaction and underaction.
Indeed. One astounding underreaction is to the well-established, substantial health consequences of fossil fuels via air quality, by people advocating cleaner energy on climate change grounds. Why are they so often leaving that huge weapon on the floor of the debate arena? Apparently, just because effects of accelerated aging of lungs across a huge population is a much less sexy story than monster hurricanes.
193 (72%) of those fatalities in train terrorist attacks happened in one single event, namely the Madrid 3/11/2004 terrorist attack (Spain's 9/11). The terrorists exploded 10 bombs in 4 different trains to achieve their cruel goal. The second biggest (after Lockerbie) terrorist attack on European soil to date.
> And while regulators are awful enough to cavalierly torment every traveler in their jurisdiction, they aren’t awful enough to destroy the very industry they tyrannize over.
Are you sure about that's sufficient to stop it? The no-fly list has expanded to be a no-Amtrak list as well (at Amtrak's request). There's a push every few years by legislators to force the TSA to focus more on ground transportation (https://www.cntraveler.com/story/tsa-may-start-securing-trains-buses-and-ferries), other non-safety agencies (DEA/CBP) routinely board greyhound buses and start questioning passengers (https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/some-passengers-learn-too-late-that-greyhound-gives-easy-access-to-law-enforcement-062818.html), etc.
Yes, it's true that quickly implementing airport-level security at rail stations isn't going to happen, but we didn't get to the current level of airport-screenings in one step either. Death by a thousand cuts gives regulators plausible deniability (even to their own conscience).
"Non-existent train security"?
I disagree: in French high-speed trains, it is mandatory to attach a label with your name and contact details on your luggage!
"Plane security strains out a gnat. Train security swallows a camel. And as it turns out, camel is delicious."
Agree or not, that is almost certainly going to be the best bit anyone reads all week.
Sure, I'd like train-freedom on a plane. But getting to watch the world from the window of a plane still vastly outweighs the indignities of airports and such. The aesthetic wonders of air travel (if you get to look at a window) remain incredible.
It is possible that you have preferences on the tail of the distribution :)
I like the actual flying part too, but all the stuff surrounding it is pretty awful, enough so that I would rather drive for work travel anywhere under 6-8 hours away. It makes for a shorter trip.
On Scottish trains there is a irritating "if you see something that doesn't look right, contact the British transport police. See it. Say it. Sort it". playing over the loudspeakers quite a lot.
Oh and sometimes you do need to present a ticket to the automatic ticket gates to get on. Other times you don't.
This is the same reason why COVID related requirements were so much more stringent for international air travelers to the US compared to international land border crossers. Also the reason air arrivals pay a CBP fee that land arrivals don't. Governments impose restrictions on air travel because they can.
I agree with Bryan.
Caveat:
Train tickets within Europe are more expensive (often twice the price)
Caveat of caveat:
There are some hidden costs:
with the train you arrive in the city centre (where most often you want to be), with an airplane you have to travel from the airport to the city centre which costs time and money (and sometimes a ridiculous amount of money compared to regular public transport). This takes off some of the price difference.
Travel time for both modes of transport is about the same.
You can just hop on and off a train, whereas when one is flying, you have to go the airport, arrive two hours in advance and at the end it takes at least an hour or so to collect your luggage. And then you have to travel to the city centre*.
Conclusion: Train travel is as fast, but more expensive.
And , like Bryan says: much more pleasant.
* Being Dutch, a short commercial break:
From airport to city centre of Amsterdam is only 20 minutes by train (leaving 6 times per hour), paying the regular train fare.
Amen. I just got done flying from the US to London and it was so annoying. On the flip side, train travel in England is so easy and convenient.
We tell our kids about the 'good ole days' in the US when your friends could go with you to the gate and see you off (or be there to greet you when you arrived!), and you could arrive at the airport 20 minutes before your flight departed.
Perhaps the newer the technology, the stricter the security put into place. We seem to accept risks in activities that have been around for a generation or more, but expect anything "new" to be perfectly safe.