Crime, Transportation and Malignant Mixes

Abstract

Crime sometimes concentrates in or near transit nodes, such as train stations. Yet it is a mistake to think that public transit is necessarily criminogenic. Nancy LaVigne’s (1996) classic dissertation on security in the Washington, DC, metro system documented a fundamental principle — that public transit systems need not be dangerous. Her study found the downtown nodes to be relatively safe; the greatest risk in that system was in the parking areas of suburban stations in which automobiles remained unattended during the daily commute. That finding helps raise a more general question: do transit facilities produce extra crime in combination with another type of facility, beyond what either facility would have produced alone? Even more generally, can different land uses interact to form malignant mixes, defined in this study as land uses or activities that, in combination, engender greater risk of crime?