30 Of The Cleverest And Most Useful Tips From People Who Are ‘Street Smart’

We managed to get in touch with the Redditor behind the post and they were kind enough to tell us what inspired them to create it. u/LegalCriminal69 told Bored Panda they came up with the idea to ask this question when they spotted a guy that tried to rob them and had the urge to jump him.

The Redditor said there are no shortcuts to developing these skills in the wild. "People acquire street smarts through experience and being a lot on the streets." They believe that you actually need to practice most of them for these behaviors to become instinctive, "but some are also possible to learn through reading."

When you look at the numbers, the relevancy of these tips becomes certain. While a majority of Americans feel safe enough to stroll in the dark in their own neighborhoods, or anywhere within a mile of where their home, this inner calmness is far from universal.

In the U.S., 36% have expressed fear about walking alone at night. Also, this distress rises to nearly 50% among women, city dwellers, and the poor.

These figures are based on combined data from the six Gallup Crime polls conducted from 2009 to 2015, including interviews with 7,141 American adults. During this time, the percentage expressing fear of walking alone near their homes at night has been steady, ranging from 34% to 38%. In the longer 50-year history of the trend, the percentage fearful of walking alone has ranged from a low of 30% in 2001, a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., to a high of 48% in 1982.

The fact that a person can walk anywhere near his or her home alone at night without fear is one of the basic measures of how safe and secure people feel, which greatly improves (or, in bad cases, diminishes) their overall well-being.

But interestingly, external factors that one might expect to significantly affect this measure (such as a declining national crime rate and a plethora of highly publicized mass shootings) have failed to push fear up or down.

Even fluctuations in Americans' sense that crime is increasing or decreasing have not considerably changed their beliefs about whether or not their neighborhoods are dangerous.