Did you know?

 

America’s public transportation systems have provided comfort, safety, security and rescue, no matter what the threat.

 

On September 11, 2001, public transit in New York City, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. helped to safely evacuate citizens from center cities. In other cities around the country, public transit systems took stranded airline passengers to hotels and special shelters and helped evacuate downtowns when office buildings were closed because of the crisis.

 

More recently, the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority helped evacuate residents from homes, schools and businesses when a chemical leak from a rail tanker occured. And transit systems in Texas, Florida, and other Atlantic and Gulf Coast states helped to evacuate communities hit by recent hurricanes and floods.

Mass transit can be a real lifesaver

 

By Marilyn Skolnickk

From 1991 to 2001, 42% of all terrorist attacks worldwide targeted public rail systems or buses.

Does this mean that public transit should be avoided?

On the contrary, transit terrorism would cause greater total casualties and harm to society if individual travelers respond to these attacks by shifting from public transit to less safe modes of transportation, or if decision-makers respond by reducing support for public transit.

Transit accidents and terrorist incidents garner more attention than automobile fatalities because more people are killed or injured at one time on heavily used public transit, while automobile crashes that kill or injurer fewer people at a time are so common that they received little or no media coverage.

Despite highly publicized transit disasters such as the 2005 bombing of a bus and three subway trains in London that killed 50 passengers:

• Transit takers have only 1/10th of the traffic fatality rate per mile as automobile occupants;
• Per capita traffic fatalities decline with increased transit ridership; and
• Transit -oriented urban areas have lower, per capita traffic fatality rates than automobile-oriented cities.

Since 9/11, most of the funding for Homeland Security has gone for aviation security. Given the pattern of terrorist attacks in the last decade, it is clear that our transit systems are also vulnerable. Because of this, Sierrans need to ask that the Federal Office of Homeland Security provide adequate security for all modes of public transportation. 

Marilyn Skolnick serves as co-chair of the Chapter's transportation and land use committe.

Published November 2005