35 Comments

"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).

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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.

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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.

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Amen. The number of person-hours lost to airplane security must be astronomical, by the way.

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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.

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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.

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> 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).

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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!)

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"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!

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"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.

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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.

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Aug 17, 2022·edited Aug 17, 2022

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.

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Aug 14, 2022·edited Aug 14, 2022

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.

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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.

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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.

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Yeah, but what about all the snakes?!

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