With the difficulty of protecting trains from terrorists, it may be wise for Los Angeles' elite to reconsider their religious commitment to light rail. It's much easier to kill hundreds of people packed into a train than spread out in cars on a freeway. Sure, a bridge could be blown and traffic could be brought to a standstill for a while, but that's no worse than taking out a train line, and there would be fewer casualties. It would also be a lot harder to take out a freeway interchange made of reinforced concrete than to collapse a subway tunnel, dislodge a few rails, or blow up passengers at a station.
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Gosh, I knew you guys were going to use the Spanish terrorist holocost to bash rail transit.
Cars are safer than trains! Please look below . . .
2001 U.S. transportation fatalities by mode:
Bus 100
Commuter Rail 78
Heavy Rail 34
Light Rail 16
Aircraft (excluding 9/11, about 200 or so)
Private Automobiles 42,116
Automobiles are acknowledged to be the most dangerous form of transportation ever devised Although safety has improved greatly in the past 20 years due to better design, passive systems like airbags, and almost universal use of seat belts these days, the 2001 speak for themselves.
The terrorists would have to nuke NYC's Grand Central Station and LA's Union Station dozens of times over before train riding became as hazardous as stepping into a Cadillac Escalade.
The key to making trains safe from terrorists is not getting rid of them but getting rid of the terrorists. I do support Bush’s efforts to get the terrorists wherever they may be.
Doubtless you believe that the sprawl-nervana-best-of-all-possible-worlds that Wendal Coxers like you would like to see is worth the 42K humans that got mowed down on our streets and highways last year. Guess you’d say that freedom (to sprawl) doesn’t come without sacrifice. I’m sure glad I managed not to get sacrificed on the Holy Altar of Sprawl in my 30 years. Sprawl is like a religion for you guys, and people killed in automobiles are like some kind of communion wine and bread.
'Nuff said.
- Dennis Lytton
Aw, common Michael. We've all read your blogs bashing the L.A. transit system before. I don't even live on the West Coast and I've read them!
DL: Lots more people drive than use trains, so the raw numbers don't mean much. Perhaps the point of my post wasn't clear, but it's that cars are safer from terrorists than trains are. You reference to dozens of nukes is obviously exaggeration, since a single nuke in the middle of a densely-populated city would kill more than 42 thousand people, trains or not. Hey, yet another advantage to sprawl!
Petra: I wasn't trying to hide my distaste for inefficient and expensive light rail -- linked to a previous post on the topic in this post. I think mass transit is fine for dense cities, I just object to people trying to impose on those who would prefer that their tax dollars pay for freeways.
Geesh! I was just joking around! Don't take everything so seriously. :)
*serious*
Oops! But then again, my point exactly (or is it just exact?).
I'm just wondering what you do for a living, because virtually every planner, regardless of political affiliation, knows that sprawl is a poor land use policy and that transit is safer and less expensive overall than highways. Whether rail is safer from terrorists or not is beside the point: even if Al Qaeda managed to blow up S.F.'s BART, the L.A. subway, and all of Amtrak in California, rail in America would STILL be thousands of times safer than driving, statistically speaking. I can't understand how people stay in denial about the hazards of sprawl and the overuse of private vehicles as the primary mode of transportation. In 2004, arguing for sprawl and more highways is like saying the Earth is flat, or that atoms don't exist, or something. Seriously, I'd invite you to do some more investigation, because only crackpots and conservative idealogues think sprawl is a good thing.
Patrick: Well, the safer bit was said tongue-in-cheek, which I thought was pretty obvious.
As for the rest, most estimations of "good land use" are based on the axiom that using less is better, which I reject. There's tons of land, and if people want to spread out and live on it, more power to 'em. We should build highways to facilitate that choice -- that's the difference between democracy and totalitarianism.