Mass Transit Terror: Madrid & London; Is America Next?
After the London attacks, the U.S. terror threat level for mass transit was raised from Code Yellow (Elevated) to Code Orange (High). U.S. mass transit systems are valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and tallied 9 billion passenger trips in 2000.
An analysis of global terrorist incidents involving ground and sub-surface transportation lends some credence to such concerns. Terror attacks against this sub-sector have occurred internationally: Europe (France), Asia (Japan), Latin America (Colombia), and the Middle East (Egypt and Israel) in the 1990s; and Europe (Russia), Asia (India and Philippines), Latin America (Colombia), and the Middle East (Turkey, Egypt, and Israel) during this decade. The Irish Republican Army bombed a Central London bus stop in 1975, killing one person and injuring twenty others.