Travelers taking to highways are exponentially more at risk

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
November 23, 2011

According to a report in the New York Times this week, owing to opposition to the TSA, The Air Transport Association expects 2 percent fewer people will fly this Thanksgiving week compared with last year, while AAA projects a 4 percent increase in automobile travel.

This raises a serious issue – the fact that many thousands more Americans die in road traffic accidents every year than they do in air accidents.

A new study by The US Travel Association also notes that complaints regarding the TSA’s heavy handed policies and procedures are increasing amongst frequent fliers.

In addition to concerns over pat-downs and radiation-firing body scanners, an increase in waiting times, having to remove clothing and generally unfriendly TSA agents are all contributing factors that are causing more and more Americans to boycott flying and take to their cars.

Although road accident fatalities are decreasing, due to the improvement of safety in vehicles, last year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, close to 33, 000 people were killed in car accidents in the US. Compare that to the 828 people who were killed WORLDWIDE in plane crashes, and the difference is stark.

Timothy Taylor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives has recently noted:

“Researchers have estimated that the 9/11 attacks generated nearly 2,200 additional road traffic deaths in the United States through mid-2003 from a relative increase in driving and reduction in flying resulting from fear of additional terrorist attacks and associated reductions in the convenience of flying.”

“If the new security measures are generating similar, or even smaller, substitutions and the driving risk has grown as hypothesized, the new methods could be contributing to more deaths annually on U.S. roads than have been experienced cumulatively since 9/11 from terrorism against air transportation targets around the world.”

Similar research dovetails with this analysis:

In 2005, researchers at Cornell University found that because more people drove instead of taking a plane in the three months after 9/11, there were an additional 725 fatalities from car crashes than during the same period in the previous year.

A study by Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in 2004 concluded that an even higher figure of fatalities were recorded -1,018 more than would have been expected based on earlier trends.

We have previously noted that more Americans die From intestinal illnesses, drowning in baths and eating peanuts than they do from terrorist attacks. Yet it is the perpetual fear that the Department of Homeland Security continues to instill in people that they are likely to be attacked, in addition to the grossly heavy handed security theatre, that is keeping people off planes and on highways.

The TSA and Homeland Security in general are the biggest scams of the decade. The massive expanse of the surveillance state that has come in the guise of securing the nation is not only killing liberty, but also adding billions onto the national deficit and taking away from programs and departments that are much in need of extra funding.

A new Congressional Report released last week, entitled “A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform” concluded that the TSA is a “bloated” and “ineffective” federal agency that is doing nothing to make airports and air travel more secure.

If The Department of Homeland Security was serious about protecting the lives of Americans, it would remove the TSA from the nation’s airports and allow people to fly without the fear of being treated like cattle, being irradiated in next to useless body scanners and being sexually harassed and groped by overly authoritative goons in uniform.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

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