Threat Assessment of Potential Terrorist Attacks to the Transport Infrastructure

Abstract

The paper presents threat assessment of potential terrorist attacks to the transport infrastructure. The range of transportation infrastructure has spread and includes railway, inland waterways, road, maritime, air, intermodal transport infrastructure and intelligent transport systems (ITS). ITS service is the provision of an ITS application through a well-defined organisational and operational framework with the aim of contributing to the user safety, efficiency, comfort and/or to facilitate or support transport and travel operations. Terrorism means acts of violence committed by groups that view themselves as victimized by some notable historical wrong. Although these groups have no formal connection with governments, they usually have the financial and moral backing of sympathetic governments. Typically, they stage unexpected attacks on civilian targets, including transport infrastructure, with the aim of sowing fear and confusion. Based on the analyses, transportation infrastructure is potentially threatened with terrorism attacks, especially road and rail infrastructure (about 23 %), and to a smaller degree the maritime and air transport infrastructure (about 2 %). There were 90,3% of incidents involve land transport (74,5% – vehicles, 9,5% – buses, 6,3% - rail) covered the 41-year period 1967-2007 in the USA. Legal steps to fight terrorism have been taken on the international level, furthermore, some institutions have been established for this purpose.