An article in the April issue of the

An article in the April issue of the Washington Monthly challenged the conventional wisdom that suburbs are safer than cities. Author Philip J. Longman cited a University of Virginia study that confirmed the higher risk of homicide at the hands of a stranger in inner cities, but went on to document a dramatically higher risk of auto accident fatality in the suburbs. By way of example, Longman noted that in the City of Houston, your chances of being killed by either a homicidal stranger or an errant automobile are about 1.5 in 10,000, “but in the Houston suburb of Montgomery County, residents are 50 percent more likely to die from one of those two causes because the incidence of automobile accidents is so much higher.” The suburban environment itself is as much responsible for those adverse consequences as the traffic it was built to carry, according to transportation expert Peter Swift, principal author of “Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency.” Swift’s research has shown that wider streets cause significantly higher rates of injury accidents than narrow streets. “You could say that the older urban centers are safer,” Swift told New Urban News, “because they have the majority of narrower streets.”