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Comment by sacred_numbers | Hacker News Reader

That's highly misleading. Overall cars kill way more people than murderers (at least double) in America. Baltimore just happens to be at the top of the list for murders per capita and apparently slightly below average for auto fatalities. For most cities there is a greater chance of dying from a car crash than from being murdered.

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It's not misleading for major cities that I'm aware of, and especially not so for the "most dangerous" ones that the parent brought up.

It doesn't "just happen" that I picked Baltimore, it's highly relevant to the topic the parent posted raised, even if you'd like to redirect the discussion elsewhere and it doesn't represent the US as a whole.

In addition to the effects of car pollution on health, education, etc., car infrastructure is also a big driver of segregation in cities, which leads to a lot of the social problems that engender violence. So shifting infrastructure away from cars is really relevant.

> So shifting infrastructure away from cars is really relevant.

Sorry, it's really not. No one murders another person because of policies that don't provide enough to support to public transportation.

A lot of freeways got built right in the middle of poor neighborhoods. I'm not saying there is a direct causal link with that and murders, but it's pretty hard to ignore the socio-economic effects of those massive infrastructure projects.

That's fair, but the person above seemed to be taking it to a logical extreme.

I think we generally underestimate the importance of social mixing in our society. Groups are less likely to see other groups as enemies if they're neighbors and take the same train to work every day. Poor people are less likely to feel excluded from society if they have friends from the middle class than if their whole neighborhood is on welfare.

Walkable neighborhoods with good infrastructure where a mixture of all strata of society live are, in my opinion, quite important if you want to prevent problems. Carcentric city planning is directly opposed to that.

Walkability isn't the issue in major cities, nor is proximity to other classes of people. In Baltimore (to stick with my original example), your likelihood of being a crime victim varies block to block, with one block being safe and the next being an open air drug market. That's not unusual for major cities in the US.

OP did say "top 10 most dangerous cities in the US" and those studies usually don't count auto accidents.

The flip side though it that your risk of being murdered is actually something you have a lot of control over. Cities with high murder rates typically have subgroups with extremely high rates of violence. So depending on your personal life and living situation automobiles could be the larger threat.

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