I had something similar happen to me in Miami about a decade ago. As a New Yorker I'm just used to walking and taking public transit everywhere. I was down there for some data center work I needed to do out of the NAP of the Americas, and one night I decided to go to see a friend of a friend DJ at some bar in downtown Miami. So I took the free Miami elevated train to a stop near the club (The Vagabond) and started walking over. I get a block into the walk and someone pulls up on a bike and is like "wtf are you doing? are you lost? you should not be walking right now, do you need help?". It was a totally fine walk, maybe 5 minutes at NYC walking speeds, if maybe a bit desolate. The guy proceeded to slowly ride next to me while I walked to make sure I was ok. Ended up buying him a beer in the club and chatting for a while, he just thought it was dangerous to be walking.
Maybe it was a dangerous (i.e. high-crime) area? A lot of areas can look OK but are not someplace you want to be at night especially alone. And if you're from out of town you might not know.
Similar happened to me. I was at The Oaks Card Club on the border of Emeryville and West Oakland. I needed to get to BART, and it was just a few blocks on one street, so I thought I'd just walk. About half way down, a taxi driver actually pulled up without me hailing him and said "Man, what the fuck are you doing walking here? Get in and I'll drive you wherever you need to go!" It was either a great sales pitch or I was actually in danger and didn't know it.
My SF story: Chinatown, near the convention center. My wife wanted me to pick some stuff up while I was there. I had been there by day, seemed perfectly reasonable. I get done with the trade show, head over there near closing time to get what she wanted (perishable, so I left it to the last minute) and coming back I realized the character had changed considerably and it was a place I didn't want to be. I hadn't gotten a car because the hassles of parking made it a negative to me.
I think this was a bit before 7pm. It surprised me because I didn't expect the character to change that much while the stores were still open. The undesirable elements usually only show up once the legitimate people leave.
Eh. I've been mugged once. When I started college in a big city, we were given a talking-to by our RA about never going off-campus alone, being careful walking at night, their own close-call story, etc. I, being a reckless dumbass, ignored their warnings. Walked all around, at all hours, basically never buddied-up. Of course, my luck couldn't last forever.
...It just waited to run out until after I got home to my "safe", car-centric suburb for the summer, and decided to walk to a nearby gym. "A lot of areas can look OK," for certain.
Yeah, that's what he was saying. I mean it didn't look the safest, but that's never something that has bothered me. A large part of my 20s were spent being places I probably shouldn't have been all around Brooklyn in the early 2000s. As soon as I got on the Miami metromover and noticed I was the only one not strung out I knew what I was getting myself into. The palm trees were maybe throwing me off -- as a New Yorker palm trees meant vacation.
I know the area well since we had a family business around there. It's a few blocks away from a sketchy neighborhood; rapidly gentrifying today, though.
At one point it was the intersection of 3 sketchy neighborhoods, but it's been a while.
I dunno about metromover but I took metrorail in miami every day during ultra music festival and the clientele seemed about on par with the clientele on the nyc subway
I'd say there's a selection bias during big international events. You feel it more than say, NYC or Chicago, because baseline ridership is low in Miami. So when Ultra comes to town there's a larger effect size, IMO.
