Safety and the Perception of Safety

There's a certain brand of writing about cities that plays a particular game of sleight of hand: conflating the statistical realities of cities with what people think about cities, and acting as if any anecdotal evidence supporting the latter is transubstantiated into the former. The latest example of this comes from The Atlantic about public safety on public transit.

I have thoughts, having just been in a city that people claim often is unsafe and having never felt unsafe at all.

1. Perception vs reality

Now it's a valid point that people who don't feel safe on public transit won't go on it (unless forced). But the sleight of hand here is that treating the perception of safety as the same as actual safety is that it elides a critical question: how do you convince people that something that is safe is safe? When you conflate perception and reality you can claim that what needs to be done is to make public transit safe.

But if you admit that public transit is safe, and that the problem is perception, it's actually much harder to produce good answers to what to do. This is why Lehman's article is so dismissive of Matt Yglesias, who makes the point that transit is safe. Actually engaging with real safety data is quickly pushed aside for survey data on perception --- which is not the same!

A key tell here is moving from discussion of rates to absolute numbers. Lehman says that "large transit agencies reported just shy of 2,200 assaults last year" and while he's probably right that that's undercounted, he doesn't give any sense of what that tracks out to in terms of the actual likelihood of experiencing or even witnessing such a crime.

There were 4.7 million daily transit trips (bus + train) in New York City on the MTA alone last year, 1.3 million on trains and 3.4 million on buses.

Let's do some math. A full MTA regular bus is expected to carry 60 people, and articulated bus 85. To maximize the chance you'd see or experience a crime, let's assume every bus is articulated and full, so we estimate a lower number of bus trips for that capacity of people. That means we would need a minimum of 40,000 bus trips (3.4 million divided by 85) for those bus riders. The same math for trains gives us (1.3 million divided by about 1400) another 900 trips (aren't trains efficient?). If every single reported assault on transit happened in just 1 day just in New York, then, the 2200 assaults would be spread over 40900 trips at an absolute minimum. If we further assumed that all trips had equal chance of violence, we can just divide them equally. That's a bit over 5% chance that you'd see or experience an assault. Wow! That probably feels high! Transit is dangerous! 1 in 19 to 20 trips see an assault!

But wait. That's is every assault on "large transit agencies" was on one agency. And all of the assaults from a year were on a day. And all of the trips had maximum capacity of riders so our estimate minimizes trips (and thus maximizes the chance of seeing an assault on a given trip). 

Each of these ramps up the danger (note that the year/day one does it by a factor of 366, since 2024 was a leap year). Actually, it seems that you're REALLY REALLY UNLIKELY to see or experience assault on transit.

But that doesn't comport with people's perception. Well, that means the problem is with perception and communication, not safety. That's a different issue! But it gets framed as if transit is actually unsafe, not as if there's a fundamental disconnect between its safety and public perception.

2. Same tired answers

And as we might expect, Lehman's answer to this is a return to broken windows policing, aka overpolicing transit to make it feel safe. This is always the answer that a certain group wants to impose both on the public generally and any public amenity specifically whenever fear mongering has created a sense of public unease. It comes, as always, with a callback to the heyday of this kind of policing in the 80s to early-mid 1990s and an insistence that this period shows that this policing is more effective than anything we do nowadays.

One problem? Again, this misses statistical reality. Crime is massively down since then. Cities and the country are genuinely much safer than they used to be. Why would we police the same way now that we did when there was two to three times as much violent crime? And how can we say those techniques were more effective than what we do now?

What is needed isn't different policing; it's different communication. It's a government and a media that doesn't try to scare people. It's actual numeracy that speaks to how increasing population produces (sometimes) high absolute numbers but low rates: 4.7 million DAILY trips is legitimately hard to wrap your head around. And it's people like Lehman admitting that people like Yglesias have a point: one high-profile attack on a Charlotte, NC light rail train doesn't undo decades of falling crime and increasing transit trips.

3. More transit for more people 

Lehman is right that it will take more than just building more transit to get people to change their riding habits. But in addition to public education about the safety of transit, the best way to get people to take transit remains to make transit actually useful. It's much easier to declare that transit is dangerous, ugly, and useless when you don't actually get any benefit from it than it is when you shave half an hour off your commute with it. It's easier to dismiss it as a symptom of those dangerous cities (itself a misnomer) when it doesn't serve you. 

This also means getting transit out of a defensive crouch. Too many transit projects get watered down or even cancelled because the politicians or even the designers themselves pre-compensate for these objections. They build worse transit because they don't have or want to spend the political capital to build good transit. And then no one rides the bad transit, and then people go on not experiencing decent transit and keep their bad assumptions about transit in general.

This isn't enough alone. Public education is necessary (but sadly unlikely from a federal level). But no matter what Lehman thinks, this is both chicken and egg: we don't get people to trust transit just by building it, but since it's a matter of perception and not actual safety, that is a critical element of the process. To show people their perceptions are wrong, sometimes you have to actually show them. 

Immigration and Chicago

 Look, I can't help it if just when I'm starting talking about cities and immigration, I happen to go to a city where ICE is actively raiding people's homes. 

And when I do, I can't help but talk about Chicago and immigration--even if the series is supposed to be about where Americans could go.

For the record, every one of these pics is from this weekend--that is, no older pics, no pics from a time when the Trump administration wasn't claiming this city was a chaotic hell on earth that needs the national guard and ICE to keep it in line. Judge for yourself.

1. Chicago is a good place for immigrants (ICE excepted)

Look, Chicago right now is a vibrant, urbanist city with large immigrant populations and a culture that welcomes a wide range of people. Sure, it had the bad fortune of coming up against what is probably my favorite American city in the CityBracket challenge, but it's a damn good place, and only getting better. 

This particular Lady Liberty may be in the parking garage of Midway Airport, but the idea of welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free is not alien to Chicago outside its airports either.

It's a city with vibrant and international cultural influences, as in this public art on the Belmont station, and a city where this weekend I heard at least three different non-English languages being spoken on the street. It's a city where my biggest problem this weekend was figuring out which diverse cuisines and grocery stores I was going to visit, and a city where despite historical issues of redlining and ghettoization, you do genuinely walk past people who are different from you every block on the street.

2. Chicago is a good place for people, period

The city really has made strides in urbanism in recent years. Since I left a decade ago, there are new bike lanes:

(even if they do sometimes randomly end)

And the El remains one of the most iconic pieces of transit architecture in the US:

It's a city that maybe does sometimes sleep (it's not literally New York, which has that phrase on lockdown) but that is up and buzzing pretty much whenever you need it to be.

This was at 11pm. It's pretty active (and remember that I try not to get people in my photos, so this isn't representative of how many people were on the street at night).

I randomly ran across a farmer's market that shut down Division Street for several blocks, with excellent pastries (and the produce looked good too, but I ate the pastries).

It's a city that has less affordability problems than most major US cities, and that frankly I'd recommend to anyone moving here--which is probably why ICE decided to make it a target.

3. Chicago is cultured

Being the biggest city in a whole component part of the US (the Midwest) pays some dividends.

There's a lot of public art (this is also in Midway train station).

They decorate the streets for Halloween.

And I would be remiss not to mention traditional cultural amenities, like the Art Institute of Chicago (above), the symphony (literally behind me as I took this photo), or the active theatre scene.

All in all, if you wanted to move to an American city (and right now I'm not sure you should, but let's put that aside), I would highly recommend Chicago.

A city that's patriotic despite the fact that its government is literally trying to put troops on its streets, because it knows what America can be at its best--because it is America at its best. So yes: visas may be hard to get right now, and ICE may have a vendetta against the city, and US approval internationally is at a low point for obvious reasons. So people may not want to come at all. 

But if they do, Chicago is a great place to choose. 

And it knows where it stands on those other issues, anyway.

Urbanism and Immigration

Today I want to introduce something I'm planning on featuring on this blog for the next little while--probably not as consistently or for as long as the CityBracket, but for a bit--which is a focus on how urbanism in various international cities might affect immigration to those cities, with a particular emphasis on Americans right now.

The reason for this is probably obvious.

In this series I'm planning to focus on the following aspects of how urbanism affects immigration:

1. The presence of others

Urban agglomerations (whether the city proper or close suburbs) contain people. That means they're likely to contain other people you can connect to, whether through work, hobbies, religion, or common national origin.

2. Ease of integration

Cities can make it easier or harder to come to a new place and navigate it. The same urbanist elements that help make a city liveable for anyone can be particularly key to the immigrant experience: getting places without needing to spend the money to buy a car or learn new signage and languages to drive can help, and tight-knit neighborhoods can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on whether it means you get cold shouldered or embraced.

3. Pleasures of experience

What is there to do? What is there that makes the city feel like a good place to be? Why would you want to live in this particular city or country instead of at home?

We'll see how this goes, but I welcome feedback or ideas about aspects to consider and cities to include.

Streetcar Suburbs

There's a longstanding concept of streetcar suburbs: in the US context, usually former streetcar suburbs, but still. These are inner-ring suburbs of a city that are or used to be linked to the city center by, you guessed it, streetcars, aka trams, light rail, and so on.

I already spoiled the point of this post above: these still exist, just not usually in the US. Here I want to talk about not what they used to provide but what they still provide: what makes a streetcar suburb distinct and why they're (still) a valuable urban form.

1. Multiple Centers

The biggest advantage of streetcar suburbs is that by virtue of centering on a streetcar line and its stops, they have a built-in main or high street. The greatest flaw of many car suburbs is that "there's no there there" (ignore that that quote was originally about Oakland, CA, which is a real city now). The distances and point to point assumptions of the car-centric design do not lend themselves to having a central space people actually occupy (as opposed to a built space that stays empty) or a sense of place. A streetcar suburb has a focus. 

And that means the overall urban area ends up with multiple centers.

My favorite part of wandering around Greater London, for example, is that the various towns that have agglomerated into this megacity each retain a certain sense of self; there is still some kind of high street or center that is distinctly that area's hub. 

"Downtown" Croydon, for example, feels more active than many a full-sized city center in the US. 

This is because of how the transit works to focus and channel people flow to create and reinforce natural multi-centrality in the area. We can still have this as long as we build for it: the Croydon trams didn't survive, they were rebuilt. The same is true for the Canary Wharf area and the DLR in London; we can still produce this urban form if we want.

2. Two-Way Flow

An important part of a streetcar suburb (not an American commuter rail suburb) is that transit flow goes both ways, from city center to suburb as well as suburb to center. This is obviously related to the first point, but distinct in that it's about how the service of transit moves people (or more accurately allows people to move themselves) as opposed to the built environment and how it centers certain areas.

You can always work in the city and live in a suburb; most US cities assume you will, even with cars. But streetcar suburbs allow outflow too, and ease reverse commutes and other non-standardized movement of people. 

This can lead to establishment of whole financial districts outside the city center, as in the aforementioned Canary Wharf or La Defense in Paris. But it can also just make it easier to work, live, and move around the city.

Again, these are modern, renewed examples. We can and should build more of these. And once the transit infrastructure is in place, we need to actually run transit to allow this: no US-style one-way-only commuter nonsense, and no empty bus lanes or train tracks all day long.

3. Mixed Zoning and ToD

Streetcar suburbs also usually have mixed zoning at least near the streetcar itself, a form of transit-oriented development (ToD). This enables people to do all of living, working, shopping, and enjoying life nearby to each other, rather than in total separation as in much modern zoning.

As here, again in Croydon.

Again, this remains doable today. We stopped doing it in much of the US, but that is a choice that could be changed.

It doesn't need to be giant financial districts either! It can just be places that allow people to stop for a meal or a drink, go shopping, sit in parks, and generally hang out, all within reasonable distance of their home or work, or the transit they take between those points.

Thinking of the Quad Cities, we may not have an urban core in the way a London or a Paris does, but we could all be each others' streetcar suburbs. We could have transit that allows common commutes between cities, centers urban activity along its routes, and allows for mixed-use, larger-scale development around it. We used to have some of this back in the day--we could again, if we had the political will.

What about your city or suburb? Does it have this urban texture? Could it? What would need to change?

Streetscapes and Peoples

So when you walk around the Quad Cities, it is unusual, except at very specific times of day (school out-time, major events, etc.) to encounter other pedestrians. This can make it uncomfortable to walk about, both because infrastructure may be missing (since no one is perceived to use it) and because it almost attaches a stigma to being on foot.

This is emphatically not the case in other places, scaling up to places where there are actually too many people on the street to walk comfortably for the opposite reason.

In this post, I wanted to think about the different levels of pedestrian streetscapes I perceive there as being, how they come about, and how they differ.

1. The Empty Scene

This can be empty in the way that quasi-urbanism produces, where there is infrastructure but no people, or empty because there's just nowhere to walk at all.

Or sometimes it's a failure of other elements, like a place that used to have people but now, due to population decline, changing transportation or entertainment options, or some other reason does not.

They used to wait for the interurban here, but no more.

2. The Open Street

Here we have people, but only occasionally; it's not actively unusual or strange to walk, but people always assume they'll have space to walk.

A university outside of actual instructional months may be this kind of space: there are still people around, but the space is quite large enough to accommodate more, and so they're almost swallowed up.

Another example would be a place that in summer might be populated, but when the weather turns a bit colder, wetter, or otherwise unpleasant, it is not.

Downtown Milwaukee can be like this in the winter: it's not quasi-urbanist, it is indeed urbanist, but it's just not currently occupied.

One could say the same about the Toronto waterfront as well.

Another cause for this is darkness, in places that quiet down at night, as here in Amsterdam:

Or the opposite: a hopping night area during the day can become this as here in Bardstown Road, Louisville:

3. Pedestrian Areas

Here we see actual human crowds, though not so much as to overwhelm the space. This can be because there isn't a huge space but there is enough, and demand to fill it, as here in Vancouver:

Or a deliberately pedestrianized area that actually fits its design, as here in London:

This is often seen at street markets as well, as here in Amsterdam:

Or here in Wimbledon:

These are ideal spaces, in my opinion, because they represent the match between a space that pedestrians can fill and the actual demand for pedestrianism by the people and activities that surround it. Ironically, I have the fewest pictures of this scale, because it feels sometimes awkward to take people's picture in public. It's also difficult to achieve, because you risk falling into the next category above:

4. The Overcrowd

Here we have too many people to comfortably occupy the space. This can be a temporarily filled area at a festival or other gathering, as here in Louisville:

Or too narrow of a space for the known demand, as here in  Boston's North End:

Or just a flood of people, as here in New York's Times Square:

These are spaces that I still find enjoyable, but which are beginning to overwhelm their streetscapes.

The difficulty, I find, in designing spaces to move up this scale is often imagination: if people are not there already, how can we dare think that they'll show up? But if the space is neither designed for nor inviting of them, why would they be there?

This is why intermittent events like this market in Croydon can be helpful for juicing the imagination:

It's much easier to imagine a space filled with people when you have a reason to bring them there. Even places like the Quad Cities have our farmers' markets and QCSO Pops that fill downtown streets. The key is making spaces that make those events feel reasonable, not eccentric, and trying to build the city to encourage that kind of pedestrianism outside of a big event.

Who Walks?

 So when we talk about walkability, a basic question we need to consider: who walks? That is, who actually is going to be walking on the sidewalks, or paths, or whatever we put out there (or fail to put out there--people will walk where they're not supposed to too)? 

In answering that question, there are a few different angles we can take on it, each of which will produce a somewhat different result in terms of how we should design our streetscapes.

1. Everyone Walks

This is my favorite, though admittedly not the only way to think about this. At some level, everyone walks: even people taking other forms of transit, from the train to the car, rarely go all the way into their destination without taking at least a few steps somewhere along the way (cars ramming fast food joints excepted).

So in a sense, everyone walks. 

That's true in a more robust sense as well: almost everyone has some trips they make by foot, whether to the corner store, a park, a neighbor's house, or a child walking to school. They may not make all, many, or most trips by foot, but there's usually at least some places you can and do walk to.

They may not always walk in the middle of the street, like in this Vancouver shot, but they walk somewhere.

If everyone walks, that means we need to at some level accommodate everyone: we can't have sidewalks that don't function for strollers or wheelchairs, we can't have steps as a required part of the route, and we need to have sidewalks wide enough to accommodate a potentially large number of people.

Again, maybe not the whole street, but something bigger than one person wide.

2. Marginalized People Walk

Another way of thinking about it is that, at least in many US contexts, only the poor and marginalized walk. People with no access to other options, whether because of cost (a car isn't cheap, and depending on how good it is and how much money you have, neither is public transit in many places), age (kids can't drive, and sometimes neither can the elderly), or other disability or difficulty, will fall back on non-transit options, i.e. walking (and the other activities we typically classify with it, like rolling a wheelchair).

Narrow sidewalks, like this one in the Netherlands, can discourage this--but still, people can get pushed to walking in any conditions.

Now, this can be used as an excuse not to invest in walking infrastructure: it's rarely a political winner to install things that only the marginalized members of the community are seen as using. 

But from a more empathetic perspective, this should remind us to invest in walking infrastructure precisely because it's a last resort. Anyone can end up disabled or poor; everyone should still have the right to get around.

Also, if you don't like having homeless people camped out on the street, stop trying to pretend that making the sidewalk worse will somehow produce housing for them.

3. The Powerful Walk

The flip side of #2 is that when people have money and power, one of the first things they do with it is to make it more pleasant and easier for them to walk places.

Colleges (here Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, IA) are famous for good walking paths and frequent foot traffic. They spend their endowments and donor money on making it easier for their students and community members to walk places.

Beautified spaces (here the University of Washington campus in Seattle, WA) are often walkable spaces.

Tourist spaces (here near Pike Place Market, also in Seattle) are often walkable as well.

This aerial view of Seattle can give us a similar thought: the parks and green spaces are often the most walkable, and they aren't in the poorer neighborhoods.

So while the poor and marginalized walk by necessity, the rich make it more pleasant to walk on purpose.

This should teach us that walking is not just a last resort--it's also, in some cases, a luxury.

So in the end, I lied above: I think all of these examples teach us the same lesson. That lesson is that walking is something we need to invest in: whether because we all do it, or because some people have to, or because once they have options people choose to. Walking is a critical amenity at all levels.

1000 Mile Bike Evaluations

So if you have read much about my own experience on this blog you'll know that I do a lot of bike commuting: for this I use two bikes, one for when I have my kids and one that is easier to store in my office and that therefore I often use when I don't have the kids with me. The bigger bike is an Aventon Abound (the original, not the SR or LR variants they've introduced) and the smaller is a Lectric XP 2 step through (which has been replaced by later models as well).

My commute is pretty short, so I recently hit 1000 miles on each bike. As such, I thought it might be worthwhile to provide a brief comparative review of my experience with both bikes. Overall it has been quite positive, but there are differences that are worth knowing about.

1. Build Quality: Lectric Good, Aventon Meh

I have a friend who has an Urban Arrow and a Tern HSD. Neither of my bikes is that fancy or expensive, and you can tell from the build quality. 

The Lectric is the older bike by a year, but has had fewer incidents. Some pieces have come off from some hard riding (it's not the bike's fault I repeatedly hit a particular especially high curb with my pedal on my way to work) but the only times I've not been able to ride have been a couple flat tubes, which are easily fixed and not really avoidable with tubes. It has had a few issues with its suspension; the piece that allows it to lock or unlock the suspension travel broke off. But again, the bike remains consistently usable.

The Abound has had more flats (heavier load with 2 kids on the back, unsurprisingly) but also has had a tendency to have the seatpost snap where it holds on the seat; I'm not overweight as a rider, but I did use two (now three) seatpost brands, so it's not just an Aventon seatpost issue. I do think there may be something about how the seating/pedaling position distributes my weight on the seat/seatpost combination.

I recommend each, but I'd definitely want a local bike shop willing to service them both (Healthy Habits QC, here in the Quad Cities, gets a shoutout for that).

2. Usefulness: Bigger Is, In This Case, Better

I like my Lectric, and I can and do use it for a lot--but the Abound is a true longtail cargo bike and it shows. I can get two kids from school, go grocery shopping, and have my own work bag on the bike and it all fits. It's tight with a full grocery run but doable, and that means it literally can be a car replacement for at least major sections of the year (not sure I'd really want that in deep winter here given temps and ice).  

Lectric: 1 kid

Abound for two!

I like to think of it this way: the Lectric unlocked the ability to do errands and live life without a car. The Abound makes it actually pleasant to do that. 

You can still get a lot on a Lectric, but note that I had to omit the kid.

The Lectric has one advantage, noted above: being a bit smaller it's easier to store. It can make it into the elevator at work and be stored in my office directly; the Abound I have to lock up outside on a bike rack. That does mean there are tasks it is better suited for; but for everyday, who-knows-what-will-happen, single-bike use, I'd take the Abound.

3. Riding Experience: Torque Sensors and Actual Exercise 

So the Lectric brand has, I believe, finally moved towards torque sensors over cadence sensors: that is, the electric part of the bike responds to how hard I pedal in terms of my force, not in terms of how fast that actually turns the pedals. This is, I think, great. My Lectric has a cadence sensor and sometimes feels like a scooter, because once the pedals are going they don't really stop until you brake. The Abound, by contrast, feels more like regular biking, where I have to keep pedaling and get actual exercise, as well as having better responsiveness to my actual pedaling. Now, neither of them is a mid-drive (they both have hub drives in the rear wheel) so that may in turn affect things if you're looking at other types of bikes. But for these two, it makes a huge difference.

Like the usefulness, I think the Lectric is perfectly fine--but the Abound is a better choice here. I would rather bike on it, and it's both more fun and more effective for my needs.

Now, I do plan on keeping both. It's useful sometimes to have more than one bike available, especially if one actually isn't available (looking at you, Abound seatposts). And I do like being able to sometimes just park in my office. But that's my comparative review after 1000 miles on each bike: the true cargo bike with a torque sensor is, perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite.

Which is good, because it certainly also cost more.

And of course there are smaller bikes you could buy (and I do indeed have a Jetson that has nothing like 1000 miles on it). But I hope this is useful for those who might consider the Lectric XP 2 (or other) or the Abound.