Saw an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday, discussing measures to take to prevent a terror attack similar to the one in Spain.... Saw an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday, discussing measures to take to prevent a terror attack similar to the one in Spain last week. While the possibility of such an attack is awful, and the reality of the attack in Spain horrifying, what struck me after the gut feelings subsided were the ridership figures for mass transit compared to air travel, which I quote below:

Experts say that to be successful, public transit must be convenient and inexpensive, making it difficult to impose the types of strict security seen at airports. The passenger volumes are enormous, about 14 million people a day, according to the American Public Transportation Association, of whom most are on buses, plus about 4 million on subways, suburban commuter trains or other rail transport, and smaller numbers on ferries. In contrast, there are a little under 2 million airplane boardings every day..."More people use Amtrak's Pennsylvania Station in New York City in a single day than use all of New York's airports combined," said Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware....

Why then do our policymakers routinely deprecate the popularity and utility of mass transit while lavishly subsidizing environmentally-damaging and economically-unsustainabile air travel, which puts us further into dependence on Middle Eastern oil oligarchs and their US corporate sycophants?

And why is the automobile even more lavishly subsidized when it destroys community through sprawl, keeps us even more heavily in thrall to the various petro-cabals of the world than air travel does, and kills more people by far every year than terrorism, suicide, and murder combined? (Nicholas Kristof's NYT editorial bears directly on this.)

A little something to think about in this election season, embroiled as we are in an oily war led by a president who disses transit and is gung-ho for sprawl....