Out of several thousand hours (close to 10K?) of late-night walking in urban areas (such as from working into the wee hours, then walking home all the way across town), I've been held up at gunpoint twice, discouraged or thwarted countless other approaches by muggers, and several times had bottles thrown at me.
Two of the locations that were memorably the most dangerous-seeming were some of the best-lit, and they weren't lit because they were high-crime.
Some other factors to consider in what's safe and/or feels safe:
* The presence of houses on the sidewalk (with people in them who might hear you, and doors you could go bang on), even if the street is dark except for the occasional porch light or glow through the drapes.
* Presence of open businesses (restaurants, hotels, cafes, hospitals, donut shops), which are pretty obviously places you can run into, where there will be other people.
* On the other side of open businesses being good... people outside of nightlife businesses can be risky, and sometimes feel risky. (Usually innocuous here, but walk enough, and you'll eventually encounter drunk people looking to fight, and also see people looking to prey upon someone from the concentration of candidates out late at night. And you'll read news reports of criminal score-settling with gunshots, outside some of the bars/clubs you walk past every night.)
* Office buildings with visible security guard desk in the lobby. In practice, I think they could only phone the police while you're getting stabbed against their glass wall, but the witness will discourage some attackers, and it seemed much more reassuring than an empty skyscraper lobby on a completely deserted downtown street.
* Possibly: Unlocked lobby/vestibule front doors of apartment buildings, which aren't obviously reassuring like an open business with people inside, but (if you paired this info with tips) can be used by walkers to thwart attackers.
* Street crime data.
(I should add that I'm white and male, and I know other groups of people face additional threats on the street, but I don't know how my experience applies to that.)
It's counterintuitive for a reason, and to be honest I have bad (not necessarily direct) experiences in both cases, and can't conclude which one is the best. Does a busier street really mean less likely to be mugged? Why?
Question: I solve quests in StreetComplete [1], and one of the things it asks me is whether a stretch of way is lit. Sometimes, these stretches can be very short (like 1m), e.g. at intersections. I typically only mark those as lit if there's a streetlamp directly on it - so if there's not, I'll mark it as unlit even though nearby streetlamps do shine on it.
If the question asks "is it lit" I'd respond based on if it was normally lit in some way at night or not. Where streetlamps are is a separate question that can only imply if a section is normally lit or not.
I think the right interpretation of the question is whether there is lighting in the area rather than whether there is lighting immediately adjacent.
I guess there's still some subjectivity in that interpretation. But given that lights can be directly mapped, I think capturing whether there is lighting on the segment is a sensible way to do the quest.
If you want, I can help you find the ones you already marked, just send me an email.
There is a pretty detailed wiki if you want to work deeper with openstreetmap. It often has examples of how to tag different features. The entry for Lit [1] does not quite say it but it references the street_lamp [2] entry. There it mentions street_lamp should be on a point of the location of the light source and to tag Lit on the surface that is iluminated. So I have been doing Lit on all roads that is lit up by the street lights.
Thanks - that means I did this incorrectly :( Hopefully I'll be able to correct it with the help of the author of a sibling comment, and I suppose I'll file an issue against StreetComplete to see if they'd prefer to clarify it.
That is a great idea! Often I find walking directions put me on busy, unsafe streets, or make me take unsafe crossings. Didn't even think about the well lit part, but that is important as well. Gl with this!
This could really be a game-changer for me when we're allowed to travel again. I have a rare condition where a problem with brain metabolism screws up the signal to noise ratio in multiple senses, by day I'm quite photophobic and by night I can't see a thing thanks to "TV static" in my vision. Having a navigation tool that sticks to well-lit areas would be an amazing improvement over existing tools for me!
Google Maps has functionality for reporting problems. I've done the same when it suggested an unsafe bicycle street-crossing and they updated the routing.
All the studies mentioned seem to focus on total crimes and not crimes per trip. I wonder if the (lack of) effect they observe is because of increased lighting leading to increased trips which leads to more crimes just because there are more people, cancelling out or negating any increased safety per trip.
Isaac Asimov did an interesting short article on the full moon and increased crime.
He concludes crime goes up because we have a connection to the full moon rather than the extra lighting.
His article was written decades ago. I suspect today he'd change that idea given the better data available.
Personally I think adding lighting to cities makes personal safety far better. I get what the studies are doing but I think they are relying on novelty to get published over boring.
But certainly you have to watch putting someone down a well-lit underpass over crossing a not so well-lit busy road.
I think the value to the data is for councils to find where lighting should be improved. Plus there's also more to safety than just crime.
In a team at a hackathon I implemented a similar thing (safe way to school) with GraphHopper: https://github.com/karussell/nordhopper (Disclaimer: I'm one of the GraphHopper devs)
There is no mobile app only a simple web app. But we also considered crash data from the German government which could be important. Additionally with GraphHopper walking routes avoid bigger streets and consider many signals from OpenStreetMap data. My personal route would probably just to avoid some dark parks to be honest as every detour is ugly.
And so a nice feature is the customizable routing where you can change your preferences per request because it is not clear if a longer detour along lamps is really safer if it is twice the length and at which point your personal preferences are or how you wish to mix other signals into the cost function of the route.
Depends on the neighborhood. The average open-air drug market in the Tenderloin is dangerous precisely because of how busy it is.
Crowds are a decent security by obscurity mechanism, but only if you blend in. If you code as an outsider (e.g. a Japanese tourist in West Philly), then bustle might be a bug not a feature. More potential predators' attention to catch.
So many factors play into both subjective and objective safety. This is an interesting project but I'm not sure how you algorithmically encode the route you should probably walk if you're going from the Hilton on O'Farrell to the Moscone.
Yeah, but I'll also take a sketchy crowd in the Tenderloin at 10pm over being in the Richmond at 1am with nobody around except that one car that keeps circling the blocks.
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Two of the locations that were memorably the most dangerous-seeming were some of the best-lit, and they weren't lit because they were high-crime.
Some other factors to consider in what's safe and/or feels safe:
* The presence of houses on the sidewalk (with people in them who might hear you, and doors you could go bang on), even if the street is dark except for the occasional porch light or glow through the drapes.
* Presence of open businesses (restaurants, hotels, cafes, hospitals, donut shops), which are pretty obviously places you can run into, where there will be other people.
* On the other side of open businesses being good... people outside of nightlife businesses can be risky, and sometimes feel risky. (Usually innocuous here, but walk enough, and you'll eventually encounter drunk people looking to fight, and also see people looking to prey upon someone from the concentration of candidates out late at night. And you'll read news reports of criminal score-settling with gunshots, outside some of the bars/clubs you walk past every night.)
* Office buildings with visible security guard desk in the lobby. In practice, I think they could only phone the police while you're getting stabbed against their glass wall, but the witness will discourage some attackers, and it seemed much more reassuring than an empty skyscraper lobby on a completely deserted downtown street.
* Possibly: Unlocked lobby/vestibule front doors of apartment buildings, which aren't obviously reassuring like an open business with people inside, but (if you paired this info with tips) can be used by walkers to thwart attackers.
* Street crime data.
(I should add that I'm white and male, and I know other groups of people face additional threats on the street, but I don't know how my experience applies to that.)
* Pedestrian traffic - busier streets with more people mean less likely to be mugged vs the empty side street.
Is that the right thing to do?
[1] https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete
I guess there's still some subjectivity in that interpretation. But given that lights can be directly mapped, I think capturing whether there is lighting on the segment is a sensible way to do the quest.
If you want, I can help you find the ones you already marked, just send me an email.
Is this actually a common occurrence in America? How do people put up with this?
[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:lit
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dstreet_lam...
I have a friend where this could apply.
He concludes crime goes up because we have a connection to the full moon rather than the extra lighting.
His article was written decades ago. I suspect today he'd change that idea given the better data available.
Personally I think adding lighting to cities makes personal safety far better. I get what the studies are doing but I think they are relying on novelty to get published over boring.
But certainly you have to watch putting someone down a well-lit underpass over crossing a not so well-lit busy road.
I think the value to the data is for councils to find where lighting should be improved. Plus there's also more to safety than just crime.
There is no mobile app only a simple web app. But we also considered crash data from the German government which could be important. Additionally with GraphHopper walking routes avoid bigger streets and consider many signals from OpenStreetMap data. My personal route would probably just to avoid some dark parks to be honest as every detour is ugly.
And so a nice feature is the customizable routing where you can change your preferences per request because it is not clear if a longer detour along lamps is really safer if it is twice the length and at which point your personal preferences are or how you wish to mix other signals into the cost function of the route.
Check out the next release soon that will get a heavily improved customization feature: https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/pull/2209
Crowds are a decent security by obscurity mechanism, but only if you blend in. If you code as an outsider (e.g. a Japanese tourist in West Philly), then bustle might be a bug not a feature. More potential predators' attention to catch.
More likely a jumpy or purse clutching individual who is oblivious to their surroundings will stand out to perps.