“Air travel is hell” is poetry, but every air traveler can relate to the poem. To be an air traveler is to be chastised, checked, re-checked, queued, re-queued, examined, insulted, questioned, and re-questioned. When you fly, you are treated like a child, a criminal, an idiot, a malingerer, a delinquent, a smuggler, a captive, and of course a terrorist. When was the last time you heard any flier declare, “Flying is fun!”? The best anyone has left to say is, “The flight wasn’t that bad.”
Still, hardly anyone imagines that matters could be fundamentally different. This Kafkaesque nightmare is the price we absolutely must pay to prevent terrorism, right? Only a lunatic would forfeit the safety we enjoy for mere convenience.
Airport policies in the U.S. and Europe are comparably draconian. In Europe, however, the airlines have a ubiquitous terrestrial competitor: the train. Passenger trains are a novelty for most Americans, but Europeans ride them routinely.
Trains, like planes, often carry hundreds of passengers. Trains, like planes, collect passengers in densely-packed terminals. As a result, trains, like planes, are highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks. You can walk on a train with a suitcase full of explosives, wait for the train to reach a high speed, then detonate it. 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.
How do train regulators respond to this risk? With a whole lot of nothing. Most train stations and most trains in Europe have near-zero security. With rare exceptions, you can enter a train station with a bunch of bags, stroll to your train unmolested, and hop on. There’s no full body scan. There isn’t even a metal detector. No one checks your bags for bombs or guns or knives or brass knuckles. You don’t even have to show your ticket before the train leaves the station. Instead, as Yakov Smirnoff might have put it, “On European train, the ticket agent finds you.”
Probably as a direct result of this blase attitude, the EU has endured multiple terrorist train attacks since 2001. Total fatalities by my count: 268.
And since the EU has responded with a whole lot of nothing, billions of rail passengers have enjoyed two decades of extreme convenience.
Verily, there’s nothing like a train.
How can deaths be so low when security is so lax? Simple: Almost no one in Europe wants to commit terrorist attacks on trains. Train travelers are pathetically vulnerable… to a threat that barely exists.
Panglossians will try to convince themselves - and anyone who will listen - that the security disparity between planes and trains is eminently logical. Nonsense. Yes, you can cause a lot more collateral damage with a plane; that’s the story of 9/11. But only if you seize the cockpit, which is now almost impossible. Cockpit doors are presently tough enough to survive a grenade blast.
Even if planes were ten times deadlier than trains, the status quo would be absurd because the security disparity is so enormous. Remember, train passengers are free to board trains with hundreds of pounds of luggage without even passing through a metal detector. Plane passengers, in contrast, face a virtual strip search. TSA has hassled me over water, poker chips, barbells, big decks of cards, and every manner of electronic device. I have had my hands tested for gunshot residue multiple times. In France, airport security once flagged my 14-year-old son for a random security interview. When we tried to accompany this minor to the interview zone, French security threateningly told us to stay out.
Plane security strains out a gnat. Train security swallows a camel. And as it turns out, camel is delicious.
I’m tempted to just dismiss the plane/train security disparity as another example of what I call “the unbearable arbitrariness of deploring.” But there is a twisted logic to the status quo. Namely:
If train security was as strict as plane security, it would cripple the industry!
Passengers might tolerate strict security for long-distance intercity trains, but virtually no one would suffer through a hour of security for a typical local train trip. Furthermore, since local and long-distance trains use the same stations, you basically have to have the same rules for both. (Yes, I know that high-speed trains occasionally have a little separate security, but this is a rare exception to the rule of extreme laxity). 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.
Do I seriously advocate making plane security as non-existent as train security? Since the cockpit doors can withstand a grenade, I see no reason not to. Even if you think this goes too far, an old-fashioned metal detector suffices. While we’ll have a microscopically lower level of safety, we’ll have an astronomically higher level of convenience.
If you like freedom on the train, you’ll like freedom on the plane. Trust me.
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Caplan and Candor
"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).
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.