For a fraction of the money they're planning to spend on an intrusive and pointless bag search, Metro could possibly train their staff to handle actual security risks a bit more sensibly.

The New York subway search scheme seems especially pointless: because there's no profiling, and since the police can't require people to submit to a random search (and probably can't even condition entry to the subway upon a search without probable cause), a bomber can just choose to turn around if they happen to be one of the people randomly selected, and walk a few blocks to the next stop and try the 80% chance of getting through there. So the only thing the New York policy accomplishes is to burden law-abiding citizens at substantial cost to taxpayers. (Update: I see Radosh has made precisely the same point, even using eerily similar language. Coincidence.)

Since we live in a society where it took years to get rid of the equally pointless "Did you pack your bags yourself?" blanket questioning, I'm not optimistic. But money spent on inefficacious searches is money that's not being spent on real crime and terror prevention.