Perceptions of safety

When I traveled to New York this weekend, I put some effort into finding a place to put my bag so I wouldn't have to leave it at somebody's apartment. Luckily, Madison Square Garden let me bring it in after all. But I discovered that in wake of September 11th, both Greyhound and Amtrak were not letting passengers check bags for the day (despite the misinformed opinions of some operators at Amtrak), and there were no lockers at Penn Station. When I called the New York tourism folks, they said that there was absolutely nowhere to leave a bag in Manhattan, not even at a storage company.

All of this is absurd. If you want to encourage tourism, you should at least give tourists a place to stash their stuff. Did everybody forget that 9/11 was caused by suicide bombers? We are trading convenience for the illusion of security. Just as we do at the airport. A ticket confirmation printout could be faked by a 5-year-old with a modicum of computer knowledge, yet somehow we consider this adequate for keeping unauthorized individuals from passing into airport terminals. On a recent flight that was running late, they did not even check identification at the gate. Similarly, at Penn Station, nobody should feel any safer because bag checking has been disallowed. A suicide bomber could quite easily walk in and wreak havoc. Or anyone could just leave a bag on the ground and walk out. As Malcolm Gladwell explains in the New Yorker, when we impose more stringent security rules, we may just escalate the nature of the violence.