What I would like is something that took street photos and safety info and somehow deduced what visible characteristics correlated with safety.
A while back I was reading a mailing list thread where someone claimed that adding more street lighting didn't improve safety. This struck me as bullshit.
I did some Googling to dig up some fact to show just how right I was. Apparently, not so right at all. There were assorted studies that showed (or suggested, not sure) that adding more lights might actually make a street more dangerous. They can make it easier for a hidden thief to case a place or a target, and some lights create enough glare that it becomes harder to see past a certain distance.
It got me thinking that popular notions of how to judge safety may be very wrong, and that reality may be quite counter-intuitive.
Another example: I grew up in a city, lived in apartment buildings. Anyone who had any money moved out of an apartment and moved into a house. Hence, anyplace that was all houses was a good neighborhood.
Years later I discovered how totally wrong this was and marveled at how such impressions get formed.
Having better evidence about what factors make a location safer, and to what extent one can accurately determine safety by visual inspection, would be very beneficial.
A while back I was reading a mailing list thread where someone claimed that adding more street lighting didn't improve safety. This struck me as bullshit.
I did some Googling to dig up some fact to show just how right I was. Apparently, not so right at all. There were assorted studies that showed (or suggested, not sure) that adding more lights might actually make a street more dangerous. They can make it easier for a hidden thief to case a place or a target, and some lights create enough glare that it becomes harder to see past a certain distance.
It got me thinking that popular notions of how to judge safety may be very wrong, and that reality may be quite counter-intuitive.
Another example: I grew up in a city, lived in apartment buildings. Anyone who had any money moved out of an apartment and moved into a house. Hence, anyplace that was all houses was a good neighborhood.
Years later I discovered how totally wrong this was and marveled at how such impressions get formed.
Having better evidence about what factors make a location safer, and to what extent one can accurately determine safety by visual inspection, would be very beneficial.