I think that's a bit sexist. While criminals will prey on people they think are weak and that often includes women, that's not exclusively so. I don't know that someone who is vulnerable would really be any safer in a well lit street at night, depending on other circumstances of course.
Cars have headlights. It could be that pedestrians can carry lights too. We could reduce infrastructure costs, electricity costs, allow pedestrians to be more conspicuous, and reduce the other negative impacts of constant lighting. You could even fund these personal lights for lower income people with the infrastructure savings.
> It could be that pedestrians can carry lights too
Aye, on my midnight walks when I can't sleep (middle of nowhere - no streets, never mind street lights, it's all trails and fields. Amazing for stargazing!) I use my watch in flashlight mode to see where I'm going wherever it's particularly pitch black. I've also got a backup make-everything-daytime strength torch on me too if I need to properly see something or take out someone's night vision long enough to leg it
Never needed to use the latter so far. I don't imagine anyone trying to prey on me would even see me (or me them) until they're right up close if I turned the watch light off.
Fun tidbit for any new midnight walkers: Your night vision is separate in each eye. If you do need to use a light source in the dark, close an eye before you turn it on. That way when you turn it off you can open the eye and still mostly see where you're going while the other eye catches back up :)
I learned it doing backstage work at a theatre, I also heard it's the actual use case for pirate eye patches -- swap eye when going above and below deck. Good times.
As a kid, I also learned your eyes will individually adapt to not only brightness, but color.
The front door to the house was open and I put my face with my nose along the edge of it. One eye faced indoors, one eye faced outdoors. After a short amount of time I pulled my face away and it was quite clear that color in each eye had adapted to what it was seeing.
Yeah, I'm simply pointing out that anecdata can contribute to stereotypes. In the way the OP posted it, it sounded like 'men are ok with dark streets, but women are the reason we can't make the streets dark'. When in reality the line isn't on sex but other things like strength and defense knowledge. As I mentioned before, those sorts of things might be more associated with one sex or the other, but it's a mistake to stereotype.
Receiving bounced waves gives you information, while emitting it gives out information, and may make you a target. A streetlight is a neutral-emitter that doesn't usually need to worry about being attacked, unlike a bobbing flashlight held by someone walking in the dark woods.
A difference with car-headlights is that the car itself is a protective shell, and it's hard for other cars to hide in bushes.
Street lights still have shadows and areas that they don't cover. You still have things like the opposite side of cars that you can't see even if you have a street light (ie your bushes example applies with or without street lights). When I say to carry a light, I don't mean the light on your phone, but a proper means of illumination. If done correctly, this would provide plenty of information before in attack range (assuming you're not getting shot at long range, which isn't really an issue in common crime today). There are also defensive tactics with the lights that can benefit you. For example, if someone is waiting in the dark for you (as your comment implies) and you blast them with 1200+ lumens maybe even in strobe mode, you now have the advantage, streetlight or not.
So yeah, you can give out some information by holding a light, mostly about position. You give out much more information being in the light from street lights, such as sex, age, weakness/disability, etc that are more useful to criminals.
The are plenty of areas without street lights or with minimal street lights today. The primary issue as it pertains to crime is not a lack of street lights, but other factors such as socioeconomic factors and defensive knowledge.
