You have to take people’s concerns seriously, but “cities are so dangerous” has returned as a political thing and is hard to change as long as one group is making these claims for political reasons.

I’ll point out that we had a postdoc in the lab I worked in from India, then Germany. When he told people he was going to Boston people told him he was crazy to come to crime ridden america where everyone has guns. He laughed about it hind-site but that image is real and gave him pause. It does real damage.

Cities aren’t perfect, but traffic needs to get bad enough or too costly and people will take transit (as my cousin pointed out about living in NYC). I just ended up riding my bike 50 minutes to work.