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MTA locks riders into terror trap

NY Daily News
8/21/05

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/339076p-289567c.html

Imagine this terrifying scenario: You're on a moving subway car when
the backpack carried by the man beside you starts to smoke. You see a
wire hanging out, hear a hissing sound and pop-pop-pop.

You instantly move away and push toward the end door. The door won't
open - it's locked. You're trapped beside a suicide bomber.

That very scenario took place in London, but with a crucial difference.
Underground riders fleeing smoking and hissing backpacks July 21 got
out of their moving cars through the end doors and into the next cars.

In New York, there's a good chance they would have been trapped because
of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's decision to lock the end
doors on 25% of subway cars.

Even as it searches passenger bags, the MTA has obvious security holes.
There are stations without security cameras or public address systems,
turnstile gates that are locked and train yards that are wide open. The
age of terror is upon us, and the MTA is behind the curve.

Nothing shows the problem as clearly as the locked doors on 1,600
subway cars. As wrong as that policy is, the reason behind it is absolutely
shocking. The agency is stuck in a time warp, more worried about a
safety problem of the late 1970s than a modern terror blast.

Fortunately, the July 21 London bombs - two weeks after the first
attack, which killed 52 people - malfunctioned. The fuses ignited, but the
explosives did not detonate.

But luck is not a strategy for safety. Nor is a foolish devotion to the
past.

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, transit systems were bedeviled by
accidents involving riders falling between cars. The National
Transportation Safety Board found that, over a five-year period, 25 of 48 rail
deaths involved "between car fatalities." Of the nine such fatalities
reported in 1981, eight were in the city.

The NTSB recommended that New York get better warning signs and
strictly enforce existing rules against riding between moving cars. According
to its 1982 report, the agency, which is advisory only, noted a
consensus among experts that locking doors "would be far more dangerous in
case of an emergency than the practice of leaving doors unlocked."

But MTA officials had already started locking some doors. That policy
continues to this day, unaffected by the menace of terror

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