TriMet just issued an alert to their e-mail list:

"In light of this morning's London terrorist attack, TriMet is increasing presence and vigilance on the transit system.

Riders are asked to report any suspicious package or person. Contact a TriMet employee or call 911."

Whatever we do, we must not have GestapoTSA agents searching passengers and demanding IDs the way they do at airports. So long as that goes on, the terrorists have won.

Whatever trivial degree of safety such searches might bring is negligible alongside the loss of our freedom to travel without showing our papers.

Fellow Friends of Transit,

Let me echo Chris' heart felt thanks that his family and most Londoners were safe from harm in today's terrorist attack on their transit system. If there's a silver lining to this act of terror it's that with little imagination one could see a loss of life that could have been many orders of magnitude greater than what did occurred.

I believe that Chris' second point deserves some further examination.

>>If we let attacks like this affect our modal choices, the terrorists win.

Let me first say that I agree that what ever else, we must all stand together to battle these evil doers. We must not take the path of least resistance for it's own sake.

Many have altered their use of public transit such as the large number of folks who no longer will fly anywhere. As vulnerable as aircraft are to terrorist attack, it pales in comparison to the vulnerability trains and their thousands of miles of rail. From a practical standpoint, there will never be enough eyes to observe all the places these rails could be disrupted and possibly kill many more than died in London today.

As a transit agency operator (speaking for myself), we do our best to protect our passengers from such attacks. But it isn't enough to assure no harm to our customers. We'll work to do more in the future.

If the worst happens and one of our buses is bombed, we'll bypass that area with all other buses and continue to operate such as London will do with the bus that was bombed today. Once the rail ROW has been disabled, it is nearly impossible to bypass such mayhem. There is a unique vulnerability with rail that terrorist are likely training to take advantage of for many generations to come. We can't blithely ignore such risks to our transit users.

Again, my prayers go to those injured and the families of those no longer with us.

Stephan Louis

I'm trying to respond to this issue. I keep getting Error 500 messages

Stephan,

Sorry about that, there is a known problem with an intermittent interaction error between Movable Type and the hosting software my provider uses. In fact the comments are getting posted, even though it shows an erry. I've removed your duplicates.