The Most Dangerous City I visited this year

For those of us from the United States there seems to be an endless amount of information on how to stay safe when we travel "abroad".  Yet we seem to forget about all the dangers we have created and failed to address domestically.  Which gets to in my opinion the least safe place I have traveled to all year: Houston, Texas.

Why do I say this about Houston?  Well lets start with the traffic fatality rate of 11.87 deaths each year per 100,000 residents in Texas.  In comparison Ireland sits at 3.5, Hungary at 7.7, and the United States as a whole at 11.6 percent.  Then add in the lack of interest in creating safe spaces for people to walk or bike to work and the lack of acceptance of these ways as forms of commuting (although I know people who do commute these ways in Houston).  This lack of creating safe places for walking and cycling are not a problem unique to Texas either in the United States.

Then add on the way people drive and treat each other on the roads in Houston.  It seems like way to many people in Houston buy oversized SUVs and pick-up trucks and use them to bully others on the road or to drive recklessly while assuming they will just kill someone else (bad assumption by the way).  What ends up happening is a large number of road fatalities.  

Then add in guns which by the way kill far more people by accident than they do in any type of self defense.

Houston isn't exactly a crime free city either, but none the less I'd rather be in a high crime place with few reckless SUV drivers who don't care if they run over a cyclist or pedestrian, than in a low crime place where people are indifferent to running over pedestrians and cyclists.  Additionally, when people spend all their time isolated in their person vehicles it is to easy to lose a sense of community and as a result see crime develop as a result of this indifference.

Yet those in Houston seem to highly fear crime, but not driving somewhere.  Which I find rather odd.

So this is why I call Houston the least safe city I've been to this year.
  
In fact of the cities I've been to this year (and I'm probably omitting quite a few I've forgotten and I'm excluding airport connections) this is how I would rank them:

From Safest to Most Dangerous:
1. Trim Ireland
2. Drogehda Ireland
3. Dublin Ireland
4. Budapest Hungary
5. Arlington, Virginia
6. Washington DC
7. Bloomington Minnesota
8. Minneapolis Minnesota
9.Alexandria, Virginia
10. Fairfax (and other nearby cities) Virginia
11. Las Vegas, Nevada
12.  Houston, Texas