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My Auto-Divorce

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When I was 12 or maybe 13 my foster brother Bob purchased a 1971 Mustang Mach 1, that’s “Mach” as in the speed of sound not “mock” as in to brutally make fun of something, which is important because Bob knew he was very mock-able, and I’m sure that he hoped that this amazing black and gold mighty sports car would put an end to all derision and place him on the road to cool-Dom. It worked on me, but then again, as a teacher I can confirm that most 12 year olds are still pretty stupid!

I washed that car more times than I can recall. 

In high school the most beautiful girl in my grade, Tammy Crouse, was dating a guy who drove a Trans Am. Yes, the Pontiac Firebird with giant decal of a Phoenix on the hood. In my future was a car with a decal of another sort. 

(Not mine, but same model)

During the oil crises of the mid seventies my mom had chosen to buy a fire engine red Toyota Corolla station wagon with faux wood paneling in the form of giant stickers from the front all the way to the back: Bob’s Mustang had a higher cool quotient in its gas cap than could be found in my mom’s entire car, but starting in February of 1980 that became the car I was to drive on my first date, to prom, to college in Utah, and home from my wedding.

But sometime between washing Bob’s Mustang AS A 12 YEAR OLD and now, my attitude toward automobiles has changed completely. NOW I hate them. I hate what they do to the environment. I hate what they’ve done to our cities. I hate how ugly they’ve made so much of our world. Most of all I hate how much our Post War development pattern has made US so totally dependent on them. I still own one, just one, but I’ve gone out of my way, little by little, to make the automobile a diminishing presence in my life. I’ve learned to use the bus again, I walk to the bank, the post office, and to my doctor’s office. In the row of 5 townhouses on my street in downtown Springfield, mine is the only one without a single allotted space for a car; I park my car half a block away on a side street. Behind the house, where we might have been able to park some vehicles we’ve instead planted a garden: some raised beds, a few fruit trees, and a handful of grape vines. I have some rain barrels I use to water the garden; but I never, never wash my car.

Death Race: February Update

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 The Death Race 2016 page has experienced some updates since the end of last month. There is a link to a new interactive map of the locations of fatal crashes in the region and a link to a page explaining the definition and the boundaries of the Springfield region.
February saw 6 people die on the roads of the region, but once again, in the busiest, most populous city, with the densest maze of streets and roads, not a single life was lost and, unlike January where one homicide did occur, there has not been a single murder in the city of Springfield this month. Thus the scoreboards read:

Springfield Murders: 1




Springfield Road Deaths: 0




Regional Deaths (not Springfield): 15





Stranger Murders: 0




Stranger Vehicular Deaths: 13



As horrible as it is to contemplate any of the tragedies of the last month, two stick in my mind. The first involves a man who was killed by a school van walking home from work in a place which can only be described as totally car centered. The news reports which followed up on the story had some interviews which were wonderfully illustrative of our disregard for human beings once they shuffle off their metallic coils. In a live report, a motorist being interviewed from his car said that the location of the death was not one in which he had ever seen a pedestrian before, and that the road was not made to be walked upon. How sad I was when a former student of mine, a coworker of the deceased at Cracker Barrel, linked to the GoFundMe page for the dead man which read that he walked to and from work every day for over a decade; presumably at the same time this motorist used the same road to commute for years; but the motorist NEVER saw him. Oh, and on the day he died he was walking with a fellow employee. Another interview connected to the TV news package interviews the local chief of police who claims that the street where this manslaughter occurred is safe because the street is very wide and the sight lines are good. You tell me if this looks safe:

  

To drive on maybe, but not to walk. We are living, and dying, Fahrenheit 451.

The other story is a tragedy beyond measuring. A young couple in a rural area departs from home, presumably for work, in the wee hours of the morning, leaving their three adorable preschool aged children in the care of others; never to return. Somewhere, at a dip or a bend in the winding old New England road, a massive truck coming from the other direction ends up sharing the same space on the roadway and their 3 children are instant orphans. Who left their lane? Why did they leave their lane? Those are questions for the police investigation, but no answers will ever bring those parents back to their children.

Yes, a point is being made with this feature on Rational Urbanism, and the numbers make the case that we are irrational in our fears of the dangers of urban living: I will go out on a limb and say we have already seen more stranger deaths on the roadways of the region, in just two months, than Springfield sees stranger murders in 10 years. But that is only half the story. A colleague of mine took a day off this week to grieve for the death of a family member, a 16 year old family member, a 16 year old family member in Florida who died while texting and driving. If that young girl had lived in a place where teenagers didn’t need cars to hang out with friends, where the expectation wasn’t that a child would be given the responsibility of managing a thousand pound vehicle, where life can be lived without the monstrous artificial appendage of an automobile, she would most likely be alive today. 

This story repeats and repeats and repeats. An excellent podcast my wife and I have listened to about coming to terms with death (with my 91 year old mother experiencing what seems like a sudden, steady decline towards the end of her life) was inspired by a young girl whose life was taken while crossing the street in Florida; on a street that was “safe and wide”, and where the sight lines were good. 

More of the Same

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(This photograph is from a Facebook post of a former student of an incident from this year) 

 

There are so many things to write about, but once again media malfeasance must take priority. In the week following my conversation with a Republican/Masslive reporter and editor I was more focused than usual on the topic and, sadly, that provided enough grist for my mill to continue grinding.
I was trying to describe in my conversation exactly the elements which were exploitative in Republican and MassLive reporting. I named quite a few, but a perfect example shot out at me to begin the week: in a story about a double shooting the reporter takes a quote which is in error and prints it without comment despite the fact it is his media outlet’s own reporting which contradicts the statement. A woman is quoted as saying “This (shooting)really hits home, (my son) was murdered five years ago. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
It is sad that this woman’s son lost his life, but two minutes of research on MassLive itself shows that his family acknowledges that his drug use led him into a dangerous lifestyle and that he was killed by being shot in the head three times while in a car with his assailants in what everyone admits was a drug deal gone bad. I understand that a mother would want to put the best possible spin on the death of a troubled child but certainly being murdered “just” for being in the “wrong place at the wrong time” is not how any reader would interpret the publicly available facts in that case.
I haven’t been to journalism school, but to me a reporter has a right to publish any quotes he has obtained if they relate to the story, certainly, but if upon investigation the statement is obviously misleading then the reporter should make note of it to the reader. Or not print it at all. Or at least, in this case, link to the five year old story to give the reader a chance to judge the accuracy of the statement for himself. 
Instead the statement is left in and the reader is left with the impression that this one man’s murder was a case of “another innocent” being gunned down in the streets. 
Hardly.
Later in the week the same news outlet published a map of recent murders. It’s labeled “2015”, but actually includes many years of data. It is an interesting exercise which would be much more useful if, instead of murders (which have no actual correspondence to place except coincidentally) it was of traffic fatalities, which are in fact heavily place related.
This assertion is supported by a list published this same week also on MassLive. This list of Springfield’s 17 murder victims for 2015 has 13 men and 4 women. 
All four women were murdered by men with whom they had been in a relationship. That is tragic, but it is a function of the relationship, not where they lived.
One victim, a delivery driver for an Asian restaurant was robbed. Tragically, of course there is a place relationship to this one murder. While food delivery is a very dangerous job, doing so in a city is probably more dangerous relative to the specific danger of robbery. Food delivery is the 5th most dangerous job in America. Then again, for every pizza guy murdered delivering pizza, 3 more die in traffic accidents. 
All but one of the remaining names are of Black or Hispanic men between the ages of 18-29 with the outlier being a 39 year old Hispanic male. What does this mean? If place were the causal factor this reporting wants to imply that it is we would see a cross section of people which more or less corresponded to the demographic of people living, working, and visiting these neighborhoods. We do not see that. The demographics are so tightly wound around a core of minority males involved in gang and drug activity that it becomes clear that that is the operative factor. 
That is not to say that this violence isn’t a problem. That is not to say that this violence cannot have and does not have knock on effects or occasionally involve innocent bystanders. It is a problem, sometimes (though from the very data we have here very INFREQUENTLY) there are people who lose their lives despite not being involved in gangs, drugs, or unhealthy relationships.
The simple fact is, however, for every story of a mother whisking away a frightened, but unhurt(!!!!!!!) child from a violent incident at a Springfield restaurant I’ll show you a dozen DEAD children in stroad car crashes. 

This misinformation and misallocation of concern matters because it impacts on the vitality of our cities. Just this week I received a comment from a parent about bringing my students on a field trip to a Puerto Rican restaurant in the city. She made a reference to acquiring “bullet proof vests” and implied that she would not sign a permission slip for her son to participate. This from a woman whose son attends a school where I have lost count of the number of dead and injured students, parents, and siblings from car related incidents in the last few years. Off the top of my head in the last year, one dead student, one dead former student, and one dead parent of a student in my class(had she not been I’d not have known), another in criminal proceedings on manslaughter charges, and another released from prison after serving her sentence for the same, and two more former students recovering from crashes which they only just barely survived. On just one morning this month in my corridor one teacher was sent home suffering from the consequences of a concussion from a car accident, and a student missed my class after being witness to a crash on the way to school.
This is the danger which is more widespread, more place connected, and about which fewer people are actually aware: automobile mayhem and death. People immediately see those tragedies as behavior related; drinking and driving, speeding, or driving while distracted. While those factors do play a role what would be easier to see from the data IF IT WERE EVER LAID OUT is that the average person is much more likely to die or be injured because of an auto crash than a shooting wherever they may live. If the data were laid out what you would see is an age range of victims not from 18-29 of one gender, but both sexes, young and old, white and minority, and the locations of their deaths, whether they died as pedestrians, drivers, or passengers, would point to high speed roadways.
What all of the murder data shows is that it is dangerous to be a woman who ends a relationship with a male. Wherever you live. Get involved with gangs and/or the purchase and sale of illegal narcotics, and you have chosen a dangerous path no matter where you hang your hat.

 
But the best way to limit or reduce your exposure to truly random danger is to spend as little time in places where cars go fast as you possibly can.

  

Millennial Me

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I’m a misplaced Millennial. My parents lived through the Great Depression, my father fought in World War II, and I was born during the last year of the Baby Boom, but everything I read about the characteristics of my daughters’ generation speaks to the life I’ve already lived and the choices I’ve already made. I’m not much for generational conversations when the underlying premise is “woo woo” in nature, but if what is intended is understanding how the material realities of a time and place impact the tendencies of a cohort of people, then I can get in to that.

*“Desire to live in urban settings,”*

When I was finishing up my undergraduate degree and was completing my teaching certification I chose to live downtown because between my wife and me we had two jobs, I had to get to different high schools to complete my practicum, I still had to get to classes at the university, we only had one car, and the hub of the bus system was a block from our apartment. On most days I took the bus to school, walked to work, and my wife took the car. If I had to visit a high school off the beaten path, I took the car, she used the bus…and I still walked to work a block from home.

*”The top reason for our lack of interest comes down to money.”*

The pattern didn’t change even after we had our first child, only it was my wife who walked to work, and I took the car. When Xela and Mckenzie started school it was within walking distance and we were able to keep automobile expenses quite low. Because the looked for boom in urban living never materialized, we were able to buy a condominium downtown, in my old high school of all places, for under $100,000. We chose to do so and found that the time we weren’t spending on home maintenance and in a car could be spent with the girls taking them to parks, museums, or playgrounds. The Springfield Public Schools were still under a desegregation order and so a “school choice” magnet program was still in effect which brought students from the more suburban parts of the city into the downtown to make the racial profile of the school more closely approximate the make up of the district, so on occasion we’d have to drive the girls to “play dates” and sleepovers in what seemed at the time far flung parts of the city.

*”They’re much more likely to find value in experiences than they are to find value in things,”*

Our relatively inexpensive living situation allowed us to do more in the community, more hockey games, basketball games, more trips to Boston, more trips to the beach, more art classes at the museums, more music classes at the community music school, and eventually, we were able to spend a summer in Madrid as a family while I finished my master’s degree. Experience was what drove our day to day lives.

*”But you don’t see a ton of 5-year-olds,”*

But we were alone. When I coached my daughters’ basketball and soccer teams I would occasionally run in to acquaintances from high school. They all lived in the suburbs, they all opted for houses with yards, and they all wondered why I would have opted to live, not just in the city, but in the heart of the downtown. In the condominium where we lived, in those one hundred units, there was not one other couple with children which decided to stay in the building and send their children to school “in the city”. There were a few who had children, but as the children approached school age it was like a Logan’s Run scenario and the families would make for the hills. We stayed pre-k through graduation and reaped the rewards of two well-educated scholarship winning daughters going on to attend, and graduate successfully from, 4 year degree granting universities.

*”Urban living makes sense for these young people.”*

I can’t say why I was, in a sense, ahead of my time. I found everything about downtown exhilarating and invigorating from the very first time I wandered out of Baystate West onto the streets of the city center to encounter, what I was told, was nothing but the decaying carcass of what had been a vibrant city center. My mom had taken a part time job at a retail outlet, The Leprechaun Shop, which had an outlet at a mall and an outlet downtown. After classes at Forest Park Junior High School I would occasionally take a bus to visit her at whichever location she was working. I preferred downtown.

*”What’s the attraction? Street life, the opportunity for chance encounters, a social life that is not accessible only by car.”*

Springfield had a school choice system at the high school level based on interest; college prep, math and science, business, and vocational education. All but the last program were located in schools at the center of the city. As the city bus packed mostly with students, but also with adults commuting to their jobs, wound its way down Main Street I would focus on the life I saw on that street. To me there was something more integral and more authentic than what I saw in the drive-in drive-thru parts of the region.

*”This generation looked around their home towns and saw something missing.”*

My years in college spent in the horizontally expanding car paradise of the Utah Valley would later confirm this to me. I found the walled streets with sound barriers protecting backyards from the roar of traffic interspersed with Circle K’s (Circles K?), Seven Elevens, Mormon Churches, and gas stations not just disorienting, but dispiriting. People would talk about the beauty they saw in the Wasatch Front: I’ve never seen a less inspired place.

*”Sharing in the public space is the millennial’s modus operandum.”*

Conversely, I had the opportunity to spend a little over two years in Spain. The Mormon missionaries I was assigned to work with we’re nearly all from suburbs in the western United States, and they all looked down on the Spanish way of life, not just the Catholicism, but the narrow streets, the daily trips to the market, the old buildings, and especially, the emphasis on public space and public life and tradition. They preferred backyards, television, and the shiny and new. What I saw was the model I had been seeking: A family focused life in a beautiful and cultured man-made environment.

*”Kids are the indicator species of a great neighbourhood.”*

Thousands upon thousands of other young people had at least some of the experiences that I had when I had them, thousands of high school students attending school in classic pre-war schools, thousands of kids visiting parents working in traditional downtowns, thousands of Americans spending time working or studying in Europe, but very few took from those experiences the idea that the heart of the city was the place to live and raise a family. I’m hearing that fellow Baby Boomers, most at least a decade older than I, will soon be moving in to take advantage of the walkable city. As my wife and I dined last night at a packed Lebanese restaurant just a block or so from Symphony Hall it was obvious that dozens of other couples had the idea of eating at Nadim’s before attending the SSO concert. I knew that these people had driven in and parked their cars at a nearby garage, that they lived in huge, now mostly empty, overpriced and heavily taxed suburban homes in Longmeadow or Wilbraham. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few more of them decided to move downtown, especially with the hype surrounding the new MGM casino, but they’ve missed out on so much, and I feel that I’ve lived a marvelous one half of my life in this place, albeit with very few people of my race and class.

(As Millennialls contemplate living, working, and raising families in cities where that hasn’t been the norm for people with options, I’d like to think that my experiences give me something to share.)

Drive a Mile on My Viaduct (If You Have a Billion $)

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Compare 360 million dollars to completely modernize rail lines connecting Boston, Springfield, New Haven, and Montreal to 200 million dollars to temporarily repair a one mile stretch of viaduct on Interstate 91 in Springfield while a 400 million to a billion dollar “long term” fix is contemplated. This isn’t an apples to apples comparison in terms of current demand as the interstate highway transports millions of people every month, and the rail lines see occasional passenger use counted in the single digits of trains per day.

Contemplating Naseem Taleb’s ideas on resilience and fragility however, it certainly appears that the old technology of steel on steel simply lasts longer and requires less maintenance than the rubber on asphalt highway system. Locomotives also use a fraction of the energy to move the same number of passengers. As energy efficiency becomes increasingly important in a world of diminishing resources and environmental degradation it’s clear that trains should play a larger role in our transportation system.

Beyond the initial shock that an entire system could be reinvigorated for less than the cost of repairing one short stretch of highway, it’s the response of the general public which I find astounding. Comments on news boards, talk radio, and news editorials seem to view every dollar spent on rail as nothing but a dollar not spent on roads. This seems to be spurred on mostly by the belief that gas taxes completely fund our roadways, i.e. there is no subsidy, and that rail service, by comparison, will disproportionately demand constant funding. The fact that the private automobile is the most subsidized form of transport in history, not just from the perspective of road construction and maintenance, but in terms of government imposed requirements for parking minimums and the premium more productive land use typologies pay to make car centered development seem sustainable, is something the average American does not understand and free market fundamentalists would rather not hear.

Breaking through that mindset is not something that a reasonable person should expect to see happen in the short term. Motivated reasoning creates a powerful barrier, or to slightly alter the comments of Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his lifestyle depends upon his not understanding it.” In the short term the only way forward is to sell insistent happy motorists on the idea that improved passenger rail will take thousands of “others’ cars” off “their roads” when they want to drive on them.

Addition by Subtraction

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I spent two days at “New England’s Great State Fair”, The Eastern States Exposition, known affectionately as “The Big E”. I’m not a big fan of kitsch or fried dough and, while I very much admire both agriculture and the people who work therein, I don’t view it as entertainment so much as the bedrock upon which all other elements of culture depend. So what is it exactly I enjoy so much about this giant overgrown fair? The pedestrian oriented space occupied by honest-to-goodness pedestrians.

As my wife (for whom The Big E is a fairly recent discovery) gets tired of hearing every year, all of the effort and focus necessary to put on one of the largest agricultural fairs in the United States makes for an experience which approximates being in your average Spanish city on an average day…which is pretty freakin’ awesome! Watching people interact outdoors and engaging in all manner of commerce without the constant threat of annihilation by a motor vehicle is a pleasure. Also absent and not at all missed, the noise of the engines and the exhaust fumes they emit.

For 17 days a year just two miles from my front door a little taste of what a less automobile centered life could be like. I like it.

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Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

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I’ve made the crazy assertion (Here and here)that walkable cities are the place to be if you want to keep your child safe. This week, news item after news item virtually leapt off the screen at me to strengthen that argument.

The first was a report designed to get the attention of parents through their bank accounts. Did you know that adding a teen to your auto insurance policy could double your premium? I didn’t…because neither one my twenty something daughters has(needs or wants) her driver’s license. The kicker to the report was that so called rural states show the highest increases in premiums because “we know that in rural accidents, they tend to be more devastating, there are more deaths associated with accidents in rural areas”. Letting your teen drive a bigger, older car was recommended so that when they do get into an accident they are less likely to die. Living in a place where your child won’t NEED to drive? Unthinkable. Notice that the main focus of the report isn’t “your child is more likely to die” but rather “you’ll be paying more for car insurance”! No mention of the more than quarter of a million serious injuries suffered by those teens who survive accidents.

Second was a report showing not only that the overall death rate for teens was correlated negatively to density(!), but that specifically the suicide rate among teens was negatively correlated to population density as well. Suicide is the number three cause of death for teens in the United States, and the correlation to suburban, exurban, and rural living is stunning.

20130719-075141.jpg

On the other end of the spectrum, teen homicide is at a thirty year low. I’ve written numerous times that whatever the rate of teen homicide, it is much more strongly correlated to who you are than where you are but, be that as it may, the incidence thereof continues to decline.

For many suburban parents the primary reason they’ve chosen to reside in a sprawling horizontal landscape is that they believe it will be a safer place to raise their children. The facts show that the further they run from their urban fears, the closer many of them get to a dangerous destiny for their children. It brings to mind the tragic story of Oedipus, but instead of the child unwittingly murdering his father at the crossroads, it is the parent unknowingly killing the child.

Drive II

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John Oliver on “The Daily Show” insists that you can tell an American from a foreigner by simply asking the question: “Walk or drive?” My wife and I shared a night out with her sister and her husband and met at a local restaurant which has another outlet very close to where they live in Connecticut and, while I love it when anyone prefers anything in Springfield to anything anywhere else, I was taken aback that, as much as they enjoy the Plan B Burger Bar near them, they would consider driving here the next time they felt like a gourmet burger because of the convenient parking at the Basketball Hall of Fame. I was at a civic association meeting where a representative of a local cultural institution was explaining the initiative to create a cultural district in the neighborhood…the presentation for which explained quite clearly the pedestrian focus of the district…and the first question was about parking.

There’s just no getting away from it. Americans are programmed to think about cars and parking first, having an experience second.

I was describing my home to a colleague: French Second Empire style Victorian Townhouse, fireplaces, wainscoting, chandeliers, little urban backyard with fruit trees, a garden, a patio.

“Do you have a driveway?”

“No, I park my car on the street.”

“Oh, oh, oh, I could never live there.”

As I have mentioned, although both of my daughters are in their twenties, neither one has a driver’s license (My stepdaughter also does not, of course, she is only sixyears old) and both of them went to college in “urban Massachusetts”, and both have chosen to live in walkable urban communities. Much has been made in urbanist circles of the poll which found that twenty-somethings view their smartphones as more important than their automobiles. What’s great about this for me is I’ve gone from being a bizarre throwback to the XIX Century, to being at the vanguard of the XXI. This must be what it is to arrive without traveling. As it turns out, rock and roll was here to stay, horizontal development was the fad!

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Drive

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I drive to work. I confess this at the outset because, to me, it is without doubt the single thing I would most like to change about my life. It is a “reverse commute”, which is to say I drive 11 miles into suburbia to teach high school while suburbanites come toward the city to work, so it is rare that I run into “traffic”. I sometimes get annoyed if there happens to be another car in my rear view mirror.

Apart from that commute, I shun driving. In the summer I take my little 11 year old Chevy S-10 out once every two weeks or so to pick up something or other, or to drag something or other away. I once had a conversation with some colleagues on a Monday after a winter vacation and was explaining how clearing off the snow that morning had nearly made me late. “It hasn’t snowed since last weekend”, one teacher observed. “Yes”, I said, “but this morning was the first time since then I had needed my car”. In my neighborhood you can handle most of life’s needs on foot.

There is a high school walking distance from my house, perhaps a 5 minute walk door to door. To take a job there, if one were on offer, would mean a cut in pay of $15,000, I would take a hit retirement wise having spent the last 20 years teaching in a different state, and I would lose the security that comes with tenure and seniority. Apart from that, I’m not sure I could get any guarantee that I would be assigned to the closest high school given that the city has at least 4. It’s hard to face that sometimes one lacks the courage to act on one’s convictions.

Enough exposition.

My wife and I attended her brother’s wedding in and around Ulster County in New York this weekend. The landscape was scenic and the venues were lovely. They were also so spread out that, not taking into account the distance travelled to get to Ulster County, guests like us who also participated in the wedding rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner were asked to drive almost 200 miles to participate in all of the activities. I did the calculation for my own wedding, and the total of all the driving required once you arrived at your hotel was 7 miles..and that is rounding up!

I want to make clear that this isn’t a criticism of the events, each of which was magnificent. It is a commentary of just how absolutely comfortable Americans are making arrangements for activities which demand extreme levels of automobile use. It was remarkable to me that, even with the petty critiques one sometimes hears at weddings involving food and drink, music and fashion, not one person even mentioned the miles and miles and hours and hours of driving the weekend’s logistics required.

Honestly, it helps me understand the DAILY reports on TV news and in print on increases and decreases of mere pennies in the price of gas. I don’t think anyone else at the wedding was from an urban, transit friendly neighborhood. I can’t imagine the rude awakening these people are in for, leaving totally to one side the other inflationary impacts of higher energy costs, when 200 miles of driving costs $200 dollars or more as it soon might (and perhaps it already should if one considers externalities).

There it is, I’ve gone a long way in this blog post just to express what I already knew at some level, but it really brought the idea home in a way I hadn’t expected. Sometimes you have to go a long, long, long way to really understand the level of commitment people are willing to make, sometimes to each other, but nearly always it seems, to their cars.

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A Beautiful End to a Lovely Weekend

Sex and Violence

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More violence than sex actually, sorry to disappoint! The only issue which comes close to the perceived quality of the public schools in deterring people from living in the city is the perceived level of danger connected with urban life in America. Bringing this to mind over the last few days has been the media frenzy over two murders in the city over the last week.

Leaving aside the fact that the media has very concrete reasons for hyping events such as these, for anyone interested in living in the city it actually can be very useful to closely analyze the events in question. One of the murders is being described as being directly gang related, and the other as the ubiquitous “drug deal gone bad”. To make a long story short, I’m not in a gang, nor do I participate in drug deals ergo I don’t feel particularly threatened by these recent acts of violence. These do represent two of the big three causes for homicide in the city, the third being the termination of a romantic relationship with a man, a circumstance which not only isn’t in my wheelhouse of life experience, but also represents a crime which relates much more closely to identity than geography.

Domestic violence is both unacceptable and horrific, but its victims are not selected for the typology of their living situations.

The point is not that I am an unfeeling, uncaring misanthrope who feels nothing for the victims of violence, it’s that I make decisions about my life and my behavior based on outcomes as they are relevant to me. The truth is, which is to say that facts show, that an individual in the United States is more likely to die at the hands of a stranger in a sparsely populated exurb than in an urban area. Gang violence, drug violence, and domestic violence do not usually target random strangers, and they are far and away the three most common types of urban violence. It may be true that gang and drug related violence diminish as one leaves the city for the suburbs, but those are not acts of violence where the victim is selected by the perpetrator at random.

There are, of course, random acts of violence, and I have no doubt that those random acts and the occurrence of events which lead to the deaths of innocent bystanders are more prevalent in urban areas than in the suburbs. There are, however, other ways to die, and the evidence shows that the closer one lives to an urban core, especially in regions where cities were constructed mostly prior to World War II, the safer you are on the streets.

http://urban.arch.virginia.edu/exurbia/death-in-exurbia.pdf

I’ve lived in an urban core with a reputation for being dangerous for nearly three decades. In a past blog post I dealt with how violence in Springfield seems to impact the perception that others have of the city more than in Boston, even when the levels of violence are higher in Boston. Here I’m going to get “anecdotal” and report that I’ve never been the victim of a violent crime (nor have I been the perpetrator!) in the time I have lived in the urban core. Among the five other people with whom I have resided there has been one incident in that time, and it actually reflected quite well on my neighborhood. My father was accompanying my oldest daughter down to the Civic Center to see the circus animals from Barnum and Bailey’s paraded into the venue. This having taken place more than 20 years ago, my father had his camcorder with him, and a homeless man tried to run off with it. Not only did my father not relinquish possession of the camcorder (or his granddaughter!), but four (count em, 4) bystanders chased the poor guy down and he was arrested, tried, and convicted for assault on an elderly person and had to serve time in prison. My dad actually testified at the trial and asked for leniency.

The point is, many people, many years, no violence. On the other hand we all walk rather than drive (or ride) to most of our destinations. Neither one of my daughters has a driver’s license (ages 20, 22) and they have managed to get to work, to school, and to perform the usual daily tasks without using a car. As parents we’ve managed to get our children to music school and art classes, dance classes and basketball practices, soccer matches and school dances, all without getting in the car. Being a pedestrian has its dangers as well of course, but walking is safer where sidewalk networks are fully developed and cars are forced to go more slowly, and that’s what cities do. Crazy as it sounds, cities are safer.

My state, Massachusetts, has the lowest traffic fatality rate of any state, around 5 in 100,000 If you’ve ever driven here, that clearly has more to do with the relatively urban nature of the state than with our driving excellence. On the other hand, the most dangerous states are all mostly rural in nature. Beyond that though, look at those numbers again; 5 in 100,000, nearly every one of which is random. Compare that to a number between 1 and 2 in 100,000 for “stranger murder”. In around 80% of homicides the perpetrator is known to the victim and it is the relationship between the two which often explains the violence.

With traffic deaths the opposite is true, it is the design of the roads, the speeds, the lack of sidewalks, the number of miles which people must drive every day, which determine the level of danger. To sum up, people who live in cities tend to die prematurely because they are the type of people who will be killed, people who live outside the urban core tend to die prematurely because of where they live. Think about it. Oh yeah, if you’re looking for the “sex” hinted at in the title (and who wouldn’t be), ummm, my neighborhood has prostitutes. I had to justify the title somehow.