Measuring the associations between eye-level urban design quality and on-street crime density around New York subway entrances

Abstract

The relationship between crimes, fear of crimes, and the physical environments of metro stations are interlocked. They ultimately influence metro safety and ridership, which are essential for not only urban life quality but also the environmental and fiscal sustainability of regional management. This study mainly investigates how the urban design quality (UDQ) of the ground-level environments surrounding subway stations, both how they express (objectively) and how they are perceived (subjectively), is associated with the reported crime density on streets. To extend conventionally interested ‘broken window theory’, multi-dimensional UDQs highly valued in urban planning literature are measured for metro entrances in New York through the applications of Street View Imagery (SVI), computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML). Significant associations are found between UDQs and crime densities overbearing the integration of socioeconomic and land use factors. ‘Person’, ‘Safety’ and ‘Complexity’ are associated with higher crime density, while ‘Bench’, ‘Streetlight’, ‘Skyscraper’, ‘Human Scale’, and ‘Imageability’ are related to lower crime risk. By bridging urban planning and criminology literature, this study provides new insights into Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). It contributes to the literature with an efficient approach for urbanists and criminologists to replicate for future studies in microenvironments.