Nothing stands in way of bus trips
By: Mike Aldax
Examiner Staff Writer
March 16, 2009
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| What gun? Criminal activity is no match for a city resident who needs to travel, according to a recent study. San Franciscans will brave sketchy areas simply to ride Muni. (Cindy Chew/The Examiner) |
SAN FRANCISCO — San Franciscans are a tough bunch.
Unlike in most other Bay Area cities, residents here are more willing to pass by drug deals, robberies and other criminal activity in order to travel around town via mass transit.
In places like Oakland, Berkeley and Sunnyvale, the high-crime neighborhoods tend to scare people away from using nearby transit services, the study found. Folks had a tendency to walk less in those neighborhoods, choosing to drive instead, according to a new study from the Mineta Transportation Institute.
That’s not the case in The City.
Residents not only expect to witness crime near transit hubs, including those in the Mission district, they say that quick access to BART, Muni or Caltrain is worth the risk of walking into harm’s way, the study indicated. San Franciscans will also use their two legs to travel where they want to go, even if it means walking through a high-crime area, to avoid driving vehicles around town.
“In [San Francisco] neighborhoods where there was more crime, people were most likely to use transit,” said Dr. Christopher Ferrell, one of the study’s principal authors. “It’s not at all that crime is good for ridership, it’s just that people are accepting in their minds that this is a fact of life in an urban environment.”
He added that The City’s transit services tend to be located in high-density areas, which invariably attract crime.
The finding was a surprise to the study’s authors, since they hypothesized that in all cases, “People living in high-crime neighborhoods would be less likely to choose walking, bicycling or transit.”
As expected, those who chose to live in suburban areas were more inclined to avoid walking in high-crime areas and using transit hubs within those areas. But even in a dense urban city such as Oakland, folks had a propensity to avoid public-transit hubs in high-crime neighborhoods.
A major reason for that, of course, is that no Bay Area city provides a transportation network like San Francisco. In fact, The City has built a smart enough public-transit system that it attracts the very people who would rather depend on buses than cars, Ferrell said.
The study set out to discover how a neighborhood’s crime rate impacted the travel habits of its inhabitants. It collected crime data from seven Bay Area police departments during the year 2000 — some in dense urban neighborhoods and others in the suburbs — and weighed those statistics against travel survey data collected by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission that same year.
The study’s purpose was to develop policies and strategies on curbing crime around public-transit hubs so more people would use the region’s agencies.
The findings confirm a recent study from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association that maintains the Bay Area’s future development should be centralized in The City, near its vast public-transit network, as a way to reduce the region’s reliance on automobiles.
“The dispersion of jobs into suburban and exurban office parks that can never be served by transit is just as much of a threat to the environment as residential sprawl, if not greater,” the association said.
