The definitive study on this topic was completed by Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick at the University of Connecticut, who compared data from twenty-four medium-sized California cities. They looked at more than 130,000 car crashes that occurred over nine years, and were able to divide the subjects into twelve “safer” cities and twelve “less safe” cities. Among these two groups, they found no single variable to be more predictive of injury and death than block size. Blocks in the dozen safer cities averaged eighteen acres in size, while blocks in the dozen less safe cities averaged
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