Community safety overview
Summary of indicator
| Indicator Name | Community safety |
| Indicator Type | Supplementary |
| User Outcome | Low risk |
Objective
To measure the actual and perceived comfort and safety experienced by a community.
Application guidance
A healthy environment is one where the road and surrounding environment is safe. Safety also forms a part of a community’s wider wellbeing, including perception of safety, comfort, physical exercise, and mental health. Layout, landscaping, lighting, natural surveillance and wayfinding can make places feel safe.
This indicator will support practitioners to understand the actual and perceived safety of a community based on presence of street lighting and historical crime data. Based on the outcome of the assessment, practitioners can determine whether improvements could be made to their project or design to enhance the safety for the community.
Practitioners can use the street lighting metric to measure the density of streetlights along a road.
Practitioners can use the crime density metric to measure the number of crimes per 100,000 people in an area.
Metrics
Related indicators
 | Access and Connection |
 | Amenity and Use |
 | Comfort and Safety |
Recommendation
- To enrich the streetlight data, bulb brightness, pole length and distance from roadway or footpath could be incorporated into the calculation methodology to provide a more robust analysis
- To enrich the analysis, manual collection of streetlight data could be undertaken to consider lighting in parks, cycleways, shared path, etc.
- Problem areas identified through the crime analysis should be further scrutinised by undertaking a Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) assessment, which provides additional detail on the factors contributing to an area’s actual and perceived safety.