The following is quoted from an e-mail to the All_Aboard list by L.H. [nawdry@gmail.com]


I can't find the original, so I'm posting this partly to get this information out there. 

It strikes me that there is a distinction between incidents that use one of these modes as a weapon and incidents that attack these modes.  I imagine that car bombs are in the category of "Private Motor Vehicles" above . . . but are not really a direct attack on motorists (though people who happen to be driving past may be impacted).  All those buses in the tally are probably a reflection of the large number of incidents that seem to happen aboard Israeli buses.

An attack on highway traffic has never  been attempted in the US, so far as I know and perhaps nowhere in the world.  Instead it is the drivers themselves that are the potential security risk.

The point of this is to show discrimination against public transit modes when road based terror is a bigger deal.  I think there is another cultural factor here in the US and that is discrimination against public space and value of private space.  Somehow the car is private space (even though we are driving on a publicly owned and operated road shared with other people).  As a culture we haven't quite figured this one out.