I’m not a fan of security theater, but that’s primarily because it’s an inconvenience. I don’t feel a lot safer and inexperienced travelers gum up the works. It turns out, there are real dangers to all of our additional protections. In addition to having a negative effect on how often people travel, it is killing us.
According to the Cornell study, roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit. That’s the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.
Noah Silver also makes an interesting parallel with Chicago’s police cameras.
[T]hey are deliberately designed to be conspicuous, since the cameras are accompanied by extremely vibrant blue police lights — and they may well decrease crime. But they only appear in marginal neighborhoods that were susceptible to high crime rates to begin with. The explicit message is that the Chicago Police Department is doing what it can to keep everyone safe. The implicit message is that it is doing so because this is a really dangerous neighborhood — and perhaps you should be buying your condo, or planning your wedding reception, somewhere else.
I’m hopeful that the TSA rethinks their approach and starts addressing how their oftentimes reactive plans negatively affect the air travel ecosystem and the health of its customers.