The terrorist attacks Thursday on rail and bus systems in London has highlighted both the vulnerability of the U.S. rail system and the enormous challenge involved in defending it, several security and terrorism experts said.
Nearly four years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and about 16 months after the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people, the U.S. commuter rail system remains dangerously exposed because of a lack of funding and commitment to securing it, they said. At the same time, the open nature of public transit systems and the huge volume of people involved make them extremely hard to defend.
"London far and away has been the best prepared jurisdiction for dealing with these kind of issues" for some time now, said Jack Riley, an analyst at Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. Ever since a series of IRA bombings in London?s subways in the 1970s, the city has been seen as a model when it comes to developing the best ways to secure public transit systems, he said.
"The fact that terrorists were able to carry out something like this in London is an indication of how difficult it is to predict and prevent this kind of attack," Riley said.
A series of four explosions rocked London"s public transport system during rush hour, killing at least 50 people and injuring hundreds more. Three of the explosions occurred on London"s underground commuter rail system, while the fourth ripped through a double-decker bus.
A lot of "common-sense measures" have been taken in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001, and the Madrid bombings in March 2004, to better protect public transit systems against such attacks, said Daniel Prieto, research director of the Homeland Security Partnership Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
Those measures have included the deployment of more security guards and bomb-sniffing dogs, public awareness campaigns and the installation of better lighting and video surveillance cameras in stations, he said.
"But if you go out and talk to transit authorities nationwide, the biggest impediment to better security is a lack of funding," Prieto said.
Increasingly transit authorities are looking for more money to spend on cameras; fences; hardened tunnels; intrusion- and radiation-detection systems; tools for monitoring tracks, cars and engines; and command and control tools for centrally managing security, according to experts such as Prieto.
At a national level, the amount needed for such increased security measures is around US$6 billion, according to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), a nonprofit group of 1,500 member organizations in Washington. So far, the public transportation industry has received only $250 million in federal security funding since 9/11, compared with more than $18 billion provided to the aviation industry, the APTA said in a statement released after the London bombings.
"Since 9/11, the federal government"s funding of transit security has been woefully inadequate," APTA President William Millar said in the statement.
But Mark Short, a spokesman at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the APTA numbers ?grossly underestimate? investments the department has made in transit security since Sept. 11, 2001.
?In financial terms alone, it is accurate to say that $250 million has been allocated so far, but that is only a fraction of what the department has done since 9/11,? Short said. The DHS, for instance, has disbursed more than $8 billion to state and local governments for use in anti-terror measures.
?They can?t spend the dollars on anything they want, but they have the flexibility to allocate those funds on rail, metro and subway systems,? he said. In addition, the numbers quoted by the APTA don?t take into account the security risk assessments or the training the DHS has performed in several urban transit areas, he said.
Short also said there are no plans to reduce transit security budgets in 2006. Under a plan proposed by President Bush, the separate budgets now for rail security, port security, highways, inner city buses and buffer zone protection are being rolled into one program called the Targeted Infrastructure Protection Plan. That plan calls for the budget to be increased to $600 million in 2006 from the $365 million allocated this fiscal year to the five areas.
Unifying the budgets allows the department ?to allocate funds where the greatest vulnerabilities are as opposed to having stove pipe programs,? he said.
At the same time, transportation officials continue to eye new security technologies, although some of those being considered by the aviation industry are impractical for railway or bus systems, Riley said. For instance, after the Madrid bombings, U.S. officials considered using technology capable of "sniffing" passengers for the presence of explosives.
"We are at least a decade away before we can even imagine using it in the context of mass transportation" because of the number of people involved, Riley said. The same is true for other technologies being eyed by the aviation industry, including continuous air-sampling tools and jamming products designed to prevent explosive devices from being remotely triggered.
The degree to which rail transportation systems are trying to address the problem varies widely across the country, said Henry Nocella, chairman of the standing consul on global terrorism at ASIS International, an Alexandria, Va.-based security organization with 33,000 members. "The simple fact is that progress has been made, but it is sporadic and it is not consistent," he said.
Ultimately, the emphasis has to be on emergency response as well as prevention, said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security Inc. in Mountain View, Calif. "Defending the targets doesn"t work simply because there are too many of them," Schneier said. "If you think about all the times 50 or more people come together in a small space -- trains, buses, restaurants, bars, stadiums, schools -- you quickly realize that it"s impossible to prevent these types of bombings."