I Said:
An easy fix for WW-V (The global economic war) issues like this would be to create a 2-tier transportation system with regular business flier iris scanned, and RFID chip permanently installed in their... you pick the orfice or organ.
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To reverse the pro-mobility bias in planning and tax policy would reverse these malign tendencies. An anti-mobility bias would promote family and neighbourhood cohesion and protect communities whose decline is so bewailed by the same politicians who pander to hyper-mobility. It would help make us - and the planet - healthier.
If rising oil prices, green taxes and counterterrorist fanaticism make travel a luxury once more, society will reap huge benefits Simon Jenkins Wednesday August 16, 2006 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1851057,00.html A stick of lipstick is a killer. A tube of toothpaste is high explosive. Baby's milk is poison. A nailfile is key to mass destruction. For the first time since the Spanish Inquisition a book is a proscribed weapon of war. Such is the infinite delicacy of western society that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be tolerated if it carries the slightest element of risk. Lesser breeds in distant lands can continue their slaughter and mayhem. We may not consort with the great god of chance. I had once thought that "health and safety" would do for aeroplanes before terrorism did. Some conclave of air-accident cardinals would take out their slide rules and decide that hurling millions of people into the air on two wings and an engineer's prayer was absurdly dangerous and could not continue. People would have to go back to using boats (until one sank). I was wrong. Despite Lockerbie and a plague of terrorist plane bombs in the 1980s, despite three jets falling (unexplained) from the sky off Long Island in the 1990s, money talked and airlines kept flying. Last weekend John Reid described an attack on a plane as "imminent", though he inexplicably allowed planes to continue flying. An attack is now said to be "highly likely", yet they are still flying. The Home Office clearly has a lexicon unknown to ordinary mortals (other than airline lobbyists). Now we are told that airlines will require three hour check-in times, with flying conditions comparable to those endured by paratroops on active duty. Airports will punctuate any foreign holiday with purgatory. Only the public's craving for exotic leisure and the government's fiscal indulgence of cheap flights keeps air travel's price/horror ratio in equilibrium. But other modes of transport were no more user-friendly last weekend. Some bus companies decided to ban hand luggage too. Trains celebrated the demise of domestic aviation with a rash of cancellations. My destination in Wales was yet again unreachable by train. To get even within 50 miles to a "bus or taxi replacement" required an Arriva carriage as squalid as an after-hours pub, with no staff, a gang of raucous drunks and a television blaring rock music at full volume. Arriva is hell on wheels, while Network Rail at weekends is hell under them. A train to west Wales takes longer that it did when I was a boy. As for the same journey by road, the stop and crawl of the Midlands motorway network proves the ability of the British to endure a trance-like state for hours on end if only they can keep in motion. Almost all Islamist terrorist attacks are on transport, as if in symbolic aversion to the west's preoccupation with mobility. Hence the ingenuity devoted to attacking planes, despite only one outrage since the 1980s. That one, on 9/11, would have been stopped were it not for the rivalry and incompetence of American security agencies, as Lawrence Wright shows in his vivid new account, The Looming Tower. Nothing will stop a psychotic madman from sometimes "getting through", but we can improve police work, as appeared to be the case in Britain last week. Good intelligence is the way to halt terrorism, not three-hour waits at airports or Home Office legislativitis. Hyper-mobility lends itself to risk aversion. When we leave the presumed security of home and car on a jaunt, we expect to have our safety "guaranteed" by others, ridiculous as this is. Restriction tends to follow not common sense but hysteria, as with the old lady and the contact-lens fluid at the weekend. I have no doubt that one day a coach-load of children will cross into the path of another one and both will be wiped out, leading government to insist on crash barriers on every main road and compulsory seat belts for coaches. Travel may be safer than staying at home. The actual risk from terrorist attack may be negligible and declining. A dozen other risks may be more menacing and preventable, such as from food processing, skin cancer and hospital viruses. Yet so ignorant are the British of risk theory that they persistently believe politicians who tell them that terrorism is the "greatest threat facing the world today". It is not. The zest for travel is as old as pilgrimage, the result of human curiosity and a longing for novelty. Freedom of movement is seen as the natural companion to freedom of speech. But as that admirable geographer John Adams constantly reminds us, hyper-mobility erodes the bonds that hold family and society together. It is the enemy of civic pride, good neighbourliness and clean air. The yearning for the holiday cottage, air miles and the fly-drive weekend break denudes home communities of their vigour and disrupts destination ones. It uses quantities of energy while creating migratory hordes in perpetual and polluting transit. The Blair government is a slave to hyper-mobility syndrome. It has driven down the real cost of motoring, boosted cheap air travel with minimal taxes and increased rail subsidies. It promotes children going long distances to a "choice" of schools and patients to a choice of hospitals. It wants not urban density but green-belt housing estates, office parks and hypermarkets. It is content to see local clinics, ambulances, post offices and shops close in favour of "regional" ones. Every planning policy is transport-heavy. Too bad if children grow obese through no longer walking to school and half the lorries on the motorway run empty. In 1950 Britons travelled an average of five miles a day. Now they travel 30, and the government expects the next generation to travel 60. To reverse the pro-mobility bias in planning and tax policy would reverse these malign tendencies. An anti-mobility bias would promote family and neighbourhood cohesion and protect communities whose decline is so bewailed by the same politicians who pander to hyper-mobility. It would help make us - and the planet - healthier. Nor is this visionary talk. Hyper-mobility is at last under assault. Middle East wars and soaring Asian demand for fuel are making petrol more costly. "Green taxes" may yet curb air and car travel. Road congestion charging is on the way. Travel, in which I admit I too indulge, was once an expensive luxury. It will become so again, and be the more tolerable for it. One foreign holiday a year instead of three is hardly a devastating lifestyle infringement. To all this the risk-averse regulator and the counterterrorist fanatic are now adding their pennyworth of restraint. There is a silver lining to the cloud. --30--
