Safe Trains or Star Wars? Fred Kaplan asks.
Madrid, and now London: wake-up calls, as some call them, that mass transit is far more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than airplanes are. So, when will we wake up?
Last year, Congress approved $150 million in grants for security upgrades to local transit agencies. This year, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to cut this program to $100 million. The full Senate takes up the bill soon. Even if the funding is restored—or doubled, or tripled—it’s a paltry sum.
The American Public Transportation Authority estimates that an extra $6 billion is needed to improve security on public railways, mass transit, bridges, and tunnels—$5.2 billion for capital investment and $800 million annually for salaries and operations. This is in addition to the $740 million that transit agencies nationwide spent on security last year. It’s also above and beyond the miserly $250 million that the federal government has spent on public-transit security in the four years since the attacks of Sept. 11.
High priorities on the APTA’s wish list include surveillance cameras, radio communications, chemical-biological-radiation detectors, code-controlled access to main facilities, as well as more funds for training, drills, and the development of security plans (which, outside a few big cities such as New York, are woefully lacking).
This $6 billion may be excessive…. In any case, it’s a reasonable guess that the task would take billions of dollars—and that’s assuming no drastic measures such as, say, requiring train passengers and their luggage to pass through metal detectors.
Where will this money come from? If President George W. Bush went on television tonight and called for a surtax to finance mass-transit security—the APTA proposal would cost about $20 per American—does anyone doubt it would pass in a flash? This isn’t likely to happen, however.
OK, I’ll bite: I don’t think that a $20 per person surtax earmarked for public transit would pass. Not in a flash, not ever. Maybe not even if a subway bomb exploded in New York or Philadelphia. If the Bush administration itself didn’t propose a watered-down piece of legislation with token appropriations, then GOP lawmakers and a handful of Dems too would be whittling away. As with education, you’d get explanations of why spending more money doesn’t actually do any good. Non-urban Representative and Senators from any state other than NY, CT, NJ, MA, RI, IL, PA, MD, CA, and maybe GA would make sure chunks of that surtax was going back to their constituency. Bureaucrats will soldier on in their job, but in general the political will does not exist for an expansion.
The only regions reliant - truly reliant - on mass transit are the Northeast Corridor, the Bay Area, and Greater Chicago. And those all voted for the other guy. Not only that, our entirely political party alignment pits urban interests and the Northern megalopolis against exurban and Sun Belt suburban interests. The latter are in power.
And to those who don’t live in an area reliant on mass transit, trains and subways are either frivolity or a luxury, buses something poor people ride because they have to. Instead of resolve in making transit safe after, their response is to cling more ferociously to car culture: why should they ever endanger themselves and their families by riding a train when they have the safety of their car? Since their communities are spread out and atomized to begin with, they will continue to expect that the response to the danger of the city (crime one day, terrorism the next) is retreat. The kind of collectivity and shouldering of common risk that one praises in Londoners or New Yorkers is currently against their own instinct.
I’m under no illusion that spending will magically make everything safe. As .08 Acres notes and the PBS NewsHour panel note, public transit has to be an open system to work and that leaves it vulnerable. But we need to start seeing transit — indeed the infrastructure of cities in general — as the locus of security, and not in a token way. That will not happen until those not living in cities can empathize, even if only in the political sphere, with those who do.
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