We’re nearly a decade into the age of Islamist terror via motor vehicle, beginning with the 2016 Bastille Day truck attack in Nice, France that killed 86 people.
New York should be hardening vulnerable public spaces. Instead, the city relies on temporary measures and good luck — leaving us little better prepared than New Orleans.
Last week’s New Year’s Bourbon Street attack, which killed 14 people, is the fault of one person: ISIS adherent Shamsud-Din Jabbar of Texas.
But vehicle terrorism is a fact of modern urban life. The New Orleans attack came two weeks after a Christmastime vehicle assault in Germany that killed five people.
We’ve had other such incidents here: In 2017, an ISIS terrorist driving a rented truck killed eight people on the Hudson River bike path on Halloween.
Earlier that year, a drug-crazed Memorial Day attacker (of hazy ideology — he got off due to insanity) killed a tourist when he plowed a car through Times Square.
Before terrorists started moving people down, we had the risk of truck bombs, like the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
Even without deadly intent, people in vehicles don’t mix with large pedestrian crowds. Just last year, an allegedly drunk driver killed four people at a July 4th barbecue downtown.
In 2001, two months after 9/11, a bad driver killed seven people on a sidewalk outside Macy’s.
No, we can’t prevent all terror attacks or other mass-casualty car and truck crashes.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images