How safe is your Harringay tube station?

After yesterday's red-top headlines from the Evening Standard which proclaimed King's Cross as the most crime-ridden station on the Underground, the ianvisits blog today put things in perspective.

The ES piece focussed purely on the number of crimes per station. The ianvisits piece overlaid that with passenger numbers and made a simple calcuation to give something that, for the want of anything better, we could call the 'crime incidence' (that is the annual number of passengers divided by the number of crimes in a year).

As ianvisits points out, that gives some surprising results. Chesham tops the chart as the most dangerous station with Barking the safest.

What about our local stations?

The table below shows how our three local station rank by crime incidence amongst the total of 266 Underground stations. I have broken the table into four sections, colour coded with red as the most dangerous 25% to green as the safest 25%.

At 95 out of 266, Finsbury Park is apparently our least safe station, but still it's in the 37th percentile. Both Turnpike Lane and Manor House get very respectable scores, with Manor House, in the 73rd percentile, almost making it into the safest quarter of all stations.

What was surprising to me was Wood Green's rank. I looked in vain towards the top of the table and eventually found it placed at position 202.

Whatever the rankings of any particular station, as ianvisits says:

To be honest, I was surprised at how few crimes there are, even at the biggest stations and it seems to be less than fear might suggest.

My full spreadsheets are attached. The first shows crime incidence ranked from least to most safe (stations without data are grouped at the bottom). The second ranks stations by passenger numbers (purely out of interest). If you want to play around with the data yourself you can download spreadsheets from the ianvisits article.