A safety score is built from four parts — night, personal, transport and healthcare. But how many genuinely separate things are they? Across 940 cities, night and personal safety turn out to be almost the same number (Pearson r = 0.99), while street crime and healthcare are the loosest pair of all (r = 0.79). "Safety" isn't four things — it's really two: how safe the streets feel, and how well the place is built to help you.
Across all 940 cities we score on every dimension, night safety and personal safety are almost the same measurement — Pearson r = 0.99. A city that is safe on the street by day is safe on it after dark. They are not two kinds of safety; they are one.
Every Kakapo city score is built from four sub-scores — night safety, personal safety, transport safety and healthcare. A companion study, What "Safe" Actually Means, asked how each of those tracks the overall rating. This one asks something more revealing: how do the four relate to each other? If two of them always move in lockstep, they are really one measurement wearing two names. If two of them drift apart, they are genuinely separate things a traveller has to check separately. So we computed the Pearson correlation for all six pairs across every city that has all four sub-scores.
The strongest result is almost total. Night safety and personal safety correlate at r = 0.99 — about as close to a perfect one-to-one relationship as real-world data ever gets. Whatever makes a city's daytime streets safe from crime is the same thing that makes them safe after dark; the "night" number and the "personal" number are two readouts of a single underlying reality. The second pair is quieter but clear: transport and healthcare travel together at r = 0.96, an "infrastructure" bond — roads, transit and hospitals all reflect how well a place is built, funded and run.
| Pair | Correlation (r) | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Night ↔ Personal | 0.99 | Effectively one measurement. A city that is safe on the street by day is safe on it after dark — the fear of crime and the fear of the walk home are the same signal. |
| Transport ↔ Healthcare | 0.96 | The infrastructure pair. Reliable roads and transit travel with capable hospitals — both reflect how well a place is built, funded and run, not how its streets feel. |
| Night ↔ Transport | 0.91 | Street safety and getting-around safety move together, but not perfectly — the calm-feeling city usually, not always, has the safer roads and transit. |
| Personal ↔ Transport | 0.88 | Day-to-day crime and transport risk broadly align, yet each carries its own danger a headline number can hide. |
| Night ↔ Healthcare | 0.82 | A looser link. How safe the streets feel after dark is only a rough guide to whether a hospital can help you. |
| Personal ↔ Healthcare | 0.79 | The loosest pair in the whole matrix — the genuinely independent signal. Street crime barely predicts medical care: low-crime cities can have thin hospitals, high-crime ones world-class ones. |
The two loosest pairs in the matrix both involve healthcare against a crime dimension — night vs healthcare at 0.82, and personal vs healthcare at just 0.79, the weakest link of all six. This is the finding that matters at the airport: how safe a street feels tells you very little about whether a hospital can save your leg. The crime cluster and the care cluster are only loosely tied, which is exactly why a calm, walkable, low-crime destination can quietly be a dangerous place to get hurt — and why medical-evacuation cover is the thing travellers most often skip and most need.
Put the six correlations together and the four sub-scores collapse into two groups. Night and personal are one thing: how safe the streets feel. Transport and healthcare are another: how well the place is built to help you. Within each group the numbers move almost as one; between the groups they drift. For a traveller that is a cleaner mental model than a single headline score: ask the two questions separately, because a city can pass one and fail the other.
The correlations are strong, but individual cities break them — and the breaks are instructive. Splitting the near-perfect night–personal bond takes a genuine crisis: only cities in acute breakdown, like Port-au-Prince and Caracas, show a real gap. Splitting the personal–healthcare pair, by contrast, is common and famous — wealthy cities with a street-crime problem sit on excellent hospitals:
| City | Pair pulled apart | Lower sub | Higher sub |
|---|---|---|---|
| Port-au-Prince, Haiti | Night vs Personal | Night 13 | Personal 26 |
| Caracas, Venezuela | Night vs Personal | Night 5 | Personal 15 |
| Guatemala City, Guatemala | Night vs Personal | Night 28 | Personal 37 |
| Johannesburg, South Africa | Personal vs Healthcare | Personal 24 | Healthcare 56 |
| San Francisco, United States | Personal vs Healthcare | Personal 57 | Healthcare 86 |
| Cape Town, South Africa | Personal vs Healthcare | Personal 32 | Healthcare 60 |
| Paris, France | Personal vs Healthcare | Personal 64 | Healthcare 90 |
| Rio de Janeiro, Brazil | Personal vs Healthcare | Personal 35 | Healthcare 62 |
Johannesburg, Cape Town and San Francisco tell the same story from opposite corners of the world: a personal-safety score held down by crime, sitting on top of a healthcare score two or three bands higher. Their overall rating splits the difference and hides both facts. Read the two clusters separately and the real shape of the place appears — risky to be careless in, but well-equipped if you are unlucky.
We queried the live Kakapo index for every city with an overall safety score and all four sub-scores present, deduplicated by city (keeping the largest-population entity and excluding New York's boroughs) — 940 cities in all. For each of the six unique pairs of sub-scores we computed the Pearson correlation coefficient across that full sample, then ranked them from tightest to loosest. Scores draw on national travel advisories from seven governments plus crime, transport and healthcare data; full weighting is at https://kakapo.travel/about/methodology. Scores are comparative model estimates, read live, so the numbers match the rest of the site.
Free to cite in journalism, research or content — all we ask is a link back. Copy the attribution below:
Kakapo Editorial Team (2026). The Four Kinds of Safety: Which Move Together, Which Are Their Own Thing. Kakapo. https://kakapo.travel/blog/four-kinds-of-safety-2026
Writing about how travel-safety ratings are built? We give journalists custom data pulls at no cost — the full correlation matrix, the pairing breakdown for a specific region, or the city-by-city divergence list. Email [email protected] and we usually reply the same day.
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Kakapo publishes real safety scores for every destination, drawing on national travel advisories, local crime data, healthcare infrastructure, and night-safety measures. Kakapo Studies is our research imprint — independent editorial, no advertiser influence on scores. Contact: [email protected].