When is the safest time to run?
Female runner safety has been a hot topic lately with the tragic three incidents recently where female runners were killed within a nine day period in unrelated events.
On Reddit a member asked about suggestions, now that her 4am running partner was no longer able to make the early morning runs.
That made me think, when is the safest time of the day to run?
When this question was posted, I thought to myself that 4am was probably a quite safe time of the day.
I went back to read about the three recent deaths and realized they all occurred in the afternoon or early evening. I then realized that to the best of my memory I’ve never been cat-called or harassed while out running in the morning.
I then wanted to confirm my suspicions about crime times. The above is a chart from Trulia that shows when crimes occur in sixteen major U.S. cites.
The far left of each graph is midnight and the far right of each of the graphs is 11:59pm. You’ll notice that incident rates of muggings, assaults, and shootings dip quite consistently between the hours of 3am and 6am.
While it’s tragic that his has to be a concern at all it may be comforting to solo runners, cyclists, walkers, etc that the morning time is the time of the day with the lowest crime occurrence.