In Both Crashes and Crime, Public Transportation is Far Safer than Driving

A new Scientific American article shows the much lower crash and crime rates of public transit travel compared with driving. “According to the data, driving a car in the U.S. is far more dangerous than taking public transit—in terms of crash risk and crime.”

“Public transit travel requires people to travel with strangers in a confined space, and especially in large cities with very diverse populations, it’s easy to feel intimidated by that experience,” says Todd Litman, founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia, who has published numerous studies on public transit safety. “Just from an experiential perspective, it feels unsafe, especially to people who don’t do it frequently.” Litman calls this dread: fearing a risk despite it having a low probability.

According to Litman, the risk of death or injury on public transit is about one tenth that of car travel. “And neighborhoods oriented more around public transit have about one fifth the overall traffic deaths per capita of car-oriented neighborhoods.”