Airline security measures is not only a threat to civil liberties, it's also a threat to the airline industry. On short distances (<500 km) I chose cars and trains. Getting to or from airports has always been an issue, but this problem has been minimized in recent decades with more and more subway systems, freeways etc. connecting airports with city centers. The check-in waiting time has been minimized with online check-in, self check-in stations etc. But all these gains have been cancelled out by overreaching security measures, mandatory waiting time etc.
But there are powerful interests that like to keep it this way. Airport owners make money turning airports into shopping malls because travellers are forced to wait there. Governments use airport security as job creation schemes. It's a leech sucking on resources all of us need.
> Airline security measures is not only a threat to civil liberties, it's also a threat to the airline industry. On short distances (<500 km) I chose cars and trains.
Good. Planes are somewhat decent means of transportation on long, rarely travelled distances, but for everything else, both cars and trains are the more ecological, economical and scalable way to get from A to B. Unfortunately, both cars and planes (and, to a lesser extent, trains) are still subsidised to a large extent, masking the real costs of going from A to B in a little tube with wings, thirty other people and so-and-so many litres of kerosine.
If you had to pay the ‘real’ price to use airplanes (i.e. the costs of airports, air traffic control, standard-taxed kerosine, appropriate taxes to revert the ecological destruction caused by airplane traffic etc.), you’d prefer to walk.
Air travel is bad for the environment, but only because the distances are long compared to driving. The fact that planes take lots of energy to propel through the air is defrayed by the fact that you can pack a lot of people on a plane - both typically consume on the order of .5 kWh of energy per kilometer of travel. Rail and buses are, of course, an order of magnitude lower.[1]
You can talk about all the other energy costs surrounding air travel, but you can do the same thing with cars. Really, they're small potatoes compared to the costs of the fuel for vehicles and in the case of cars the cost of building all those roads.
And then there's the fact that flying a distance is much safer than driving it even on distances as short as a couple hundred kilometers. The diversion of people from flying to driving after 9/11 causes on the order of a hundred excess road deaths each year.
Don't worry. TSA is trying its best to expand to other means of transportation, too. How else are they going to keep asking for bigger and bigger budgets? That whole "airline-only" thing is pretty limiting.
Self-driving cars will kill air travel for distances shorter than an overnight car trip. Or we will suddenly find that airlines' customers are not a security risk and deserve good service throughout their trip.
Not really though. I regularly travel 1000 - 1500 km on US domestic flights for business on Embraers and CRJs. It's way too long a trip to do by car and high speed passenger rail isn't really a thing that exists here in the US.
But there are powerful interests that like to keep it this way. Airport owners make money turning airports into shopping malls because travellers are forced to wait there. Governments use airport security as job creation schemes. It's a leech sucking on resources all of us need.