Transportation securityTerrorists shift focus of attacks from air transportation to rail systems
Terrorists have shifted their focus in recent years away from attacking airlines to attacking subway and rail systems, according to an analysis of terrorist attacks over a 30-year period from 1982 to 2011. The author of the new study notes that in a previous analysis, for the period 1968 to 10 September 2001, he concluded that air travel within the United States entailed a greater risk of a terrorist attack than “virtually any other activity.” Statistically significant evidence, however, points to a growing focus of terrorist attacks against ground mass transit.
Terrorists have shifted their focus in recent years away from attacking airlines to attacking subway and rail systems, according to an analysis of terrorist attacks over a 30-year period from 1982 to 2011 by a leading and safety researcher.
In his study — “Has Successful Terror Gone to Ground?” — Professor Arnold Barnett of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management writes that statistically significant evidence points to a growing focus of terrorist attacks against ground mass transit. The deadliest attacks against air and rail in the decade 2002-2011 were against subway and commuter rail systems, taking 200 lives apiece.
In a previous analysis for the period 1968 to 10 September 2001, the author concluded that air travel within the United States entailed a greater risk of a terrorist attack than “virtually any other activity.”
The new Barnett paper, which reaches a different conclusion, appeared in the online version of Risk Analysis, a publication of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA).
An SRA release reports that Barnett notes that the statistical risk posed to travelers by criminal/terrorist acts against air and rail are minuscule, but he argues that successful acts of terror have ramifications beyond their immediate consequences. For example, many observers believe that the Madrid commuter-train bombings in 2004 changed the outcome of the Spanish national election shortly thereafter. Barnett argues that “if terrorists give weight to demonstrated success,” then the vulnerabilities illustrated by recent rail bombings from Great Britain to Sri Lanka could be precursors to further attacks. Because there is little evidence that attacks on rail systems can be thwarted while in progress, the greater terrorist interest in railroads “heightens the urgency” of intercepting terror plots in advance. Barnett concludes by noting that a planned 2009 New York subway attack was thwarted by good intelligence work, not by security measures at Times Square or Grand Central Station.
In his analysis, Barnett excluded the 2,765 ground deaths suffered during the 9/11 terrorist attack against the United States because his analysis focused on risks to air and rail passengers. The 9/11 casualties would have overwhelmingly dominated the analysis had they been included, raising the danger that the understandable preoccupation with the 9/11 calamity would “obscure less extreme patterns related to acts of terror.”
Identifying such patterns was the main point of the article, the author notes.
— Read more in Arnold Barnett “Has Successful Terror Gone to Ground?” Risk Analysis (13 February 2015) (DOI: 10.1111/risa.12352)
