EDITOR’S VIEWPOINT/ It’s scary out there in Suburbanland

Ever since the development of Levit-town on New York’s Long Island, people have been rushing to the suburbs. They do this for myriad reasons: “better schools,” “to get away from the stress of the city,” “lower taxes.” But the one overriding reason people move to the suburbs is: “It’s safer than living in the city.”

This drives Bill Lucy nuts. Lucy, a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, is making it his personal crusade to prove to suburbanites that they have made poor decisions about where to live. Lucy bases his belief on a series of studies he has done comparing crime rates in Virginia cities with traffic fatalities in their suburbs. If you live in the Richmond-Petersburg metropolitan area, Lucy says, you are way more likely to be killed in a car wreck on a suburban/exurban road than you are to be shot by a stranger downtown.

“You start with the fact that, nationwide, there are 2.7 times more traffic fatalities than homicides,” Lucy says. “And the gap is growing. That is true even if you include all homicides, but it’s particularly striking if you just include stranger-on-stranger homicides.”

To people who argue that Lucy is comparing apples with oranges, he notes that “death is death. You could use other criteria, like bathroom accidents or fires. But my findings are related to what one encounters when leaving home.”

Ironically, the people who live in those gated exurban subdivisions may be the most unsafe residents of a metropolitan area. The reasons for that are simple: People drive faster on rural roads, they are farther from help when they do crash, and, in many rural areas, slow trucks and farm equipment on roads with narrow shoulders and sharp curves make passing dangerous.

What really bothers Lucy is the fact that no one seems to take his studies seriously enough to incorporate their findings into local government policy. (Actually, one rural Virginia county, convinced that Lucy is right, jacked up its speeding fines.) Oh, there’s the usual hue and cry just after a study is released, and Lucy gets called for the requisite local radio chat. Then, as he says, “the subject disappears for a few years until I repeat the study.”

Pointing a finger at national organizations like the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities and Sierra Club, Lucy says someone should be replicating his Virginia study on a nationwide basis. He’s right.

All the national local government organizations decry the effects of sprawl. Lucy’s figures show that it’s not just inefficient; it’s downright deadly. And he thinks that if people knew that, they might just make better decisions about where to live.