Originally Posted by The Real McCoy
If air travel shuts down (whether officially, or just because peopel stop doing it because it is perceived as "too dangerous"), the country shuts down.
The same can't be said of bus or train travel. Train travel is probably moderately important in the Northeast, but it could be easily replaced by driving. Bus travel could end and the country (economically) wouldn't notice.
It is very interesting that we have become a society so driven by air transportation, to the point that a breakdown in the air transportation sector might be very akin to what happens with the train breakdowns in
Atlas Shrugged.
Even more oddly, people perceive air travel as "universal," such that an act of terrorism in the skies is seen as a threat to them wherever they travel via air, whereas I believe an act of terrorism on Amtrak or the like would not send people scrambling away from the train system; such an attack would be perceived as "somewhere else" and not affecting people directly.