Economic agoraphobia

So what’s the latest thing that airline you’re flying next week had to cut from the budget? Spare fuel? A co-captain? Air masks? Replacement parts for the landing gear? Were a few mechanics or maintenance folks no longer affordable? Did somebody decide an aging fleet of jets that should have been retired years ago will just have to be duct-taped and baling-wired together for a few hundred more flights?

Not picking on the airlines here – statistically, you’re still safer in the air than just about anywhere else – but the Metro rail crash in D.C. got me thinking about something that must have occurred to lots of people, even if not many talk a lot about it out loud.

Namely: Just how much has this crappy economy put people who use mass transportation at risk?

It’s a creepy question precisely at a time when we desperately need more people to get out of their cars and into more efficient forms of transportation for the sake of the economy, the environment and our whole quality of life.

But that’s not going to happen if you start wondering whether one of the corners somebody decided to cut was the one with your life in it.

Some early speculation about the Metro tragedy, whose body count stood at nine as of Wednesday, centered on the use of aging train cars whose emergency systems might have failed. There’s still a lot of investigating to be done, and the usual suspect – human error – could still turn out to be the culprit.

But it would be naïve to think that the pressure of a tanking economy hasn’t put us at risk.

To use an example fairly close to home: Delta’s financial troubles have been almost daily biz page fodder for years now. That hasn’t stopped me from flying Delta several times over that period, and won’t for the foreseeable future. But I consciously try to avoid – at least while I’m in the air -- thinking about things like how old the plane might be, or how deeply the cost-cutting process has cut into things that contribute to passenger and crew safety.

Those things cost money. So do things like brakes, and bridges, and railroad trestles, and safety inspections, and crossing signals, and even traffic lights. And almost nobody has enough money right now.

So I’d be mighty comforted if somebody could convince me that money and safety have nothing to do with one another, and that when I leave my house – to cross a street, a state or an ocean – I’m just as safe as I would be if times were flush. It’ll be a tough sell.

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