Since the year 2000, “short haul [air] traffic” has “Decline[d] in the US” by $34 billion. Eric Morris alerted me to an article that attributes the loss to three factors: airline consolidation; increased pricing; and–ahem–”Increased security requirements and ‘hassle factor’” that “have made alternative surface transportation favorable to flying on short sectors.” The “hassle factor,” a.k.a. the TSA, has “made alternative surface transportation favorable to flying on long sectors,” too, if you ask me and the other former flyers who now boycott commercial aviation.
Intriguing, isn’t it, that the airlines would rather forfeit those billions than demand that their bought-and-paid-for congresscriminals abolish a bureaucracy abusing their customers.
Meanwhile, why not spread the “hassle factor” and reduced business from aviation to transit? From Bill Martin comes a link to a report that Los Angeles’ transit system will irradiate its customers while denuding them via new and improved porno-scanners. Yes! But unlike the TSA’s slow-as-molasses contraptions (after all, the agency’s Peeping Toms want a go-o-o-d, lo-o-ong look at you, Serf), transit’s version will “process up to 600 people per hour in the (currently) voluntary screening…”
“Voluntary.” Why would anyone willingly endure such a degrading insult just to squeeze into a crowded, dirty and perpetually late subway (or so I assume as a veteran of New York City’s underground horror. On the other hand, at least this time Our Rulers are eviscerating the Fourth Amendment in their own arena rather than invading an ostensibly private industry to ogle and hassle its passengers)? Whatever, I join the article’s author in advising, “Now would be the time for the traveling public to draw a line in the sand while public testing is underway and a pushback has a chance of being considered.” Yo, Villeins: REFUSE to cooperate with your own enslavement. Shun LA’s Metro and anywhere else the abominable “security theater” opens.
8:59 pm on August 18, 2017
