I was just thinking about this because we have both crime and road accident datasets on UKCrimeStats and it would be a good study. It turns out quite a lot of work has been done on this before – like here in Japan. But no one has done it, as far as I’m aware, with UK data yet which should have significant planning considerations.
On one level, of course increased urban density invariably leads to more crime because there is a higher chance of victims and perpetrators coming into contact with one another. Road accidents aren’t just to do with the volume of traffic though and certainly not always the speed of it. Correlation of course is not causation. But it would be interesting to know where the joint crime and road accident hotspots are in the UK (ex-Scotland) and work back from there.