> Nighttime is stigmatized

I think this is a stronger factor than we give credit to. For example, I live in a very suburban, low crime, safe area. Crime mostly centering around property theft.

When I was younger, a few cities got together and decided to rip up the tracks and turn them into nature trails. Everyone ... except for a handful of homeowners who's homes backed up to the tracks ... loved the idea. I was a roommate to the child of one of those homeowners and ended up paying way more attention to the whole thing than I should have.

The fear was that it provided an excellent route for thieves (back patio sliding doors, dirt-bike accessible path) which would be used to "sneak in and sneak out", making off with their Hi-Fi/probably Packard Bell desktop. I can't remember what eventually calmed the homeowners down (some weren't, of course) but I believe a lot of it amounted to a commitment to enforcement of dusk-to-dawn usage rules and some poles to make it impossible to travel the trail by car (dirt bikes are still a problem).

I could understand the argument back then[0]; most cameras on businesses were dummies due to the cost of "real ones" (let alone maintenance), weren't night vision and "the cover of darkness", when most are sleeping, is more favorable to crime (and more likely to have a higher percentage of intoxicated individuals).

I was surprised at how well prepared the county was for the NIMBY response, though. I recall some stat that basically pointed out "there hasn't been a murder in a decade or any violent crime that wasn't domestic, under ten home burglaries (where they "entered a home", i.e. not an unlocked car in the driveway with an expensive stereo) but as they went on and on the message was clear "you're not going to be robbed."

The puzzling thing, for me, though was -- they had abandoned railroad tracks behind their house, before. They were very usable as footpaths, already, except that "your average township citizen" didn't do that. None of it was properly posted/signed/fenced and part of the motivation for converting it was that the county spent money on maintenance[1] for something abandoned.

As I've gotten older, many things have changed. $5 IR cameras, LED lights so pervasive in the town that what qualifies as "night" these days, just ... isn't. It had always been the case that "having people generally around" is a good crime deterrent. Nobody wants to get caught. And, of course, if you're on foot or on e-bike, these trails make for extremely convenient paths to local businesses (avoiding a mile or two in distance in some cases due to the way they cut through things) so they'd be very convenient to use any time if you're not traveling by car.

Also ... as I've gotten older, I've reflected on the reactions of those families freaking out about "having the county give you back yard access to a multi-county hiking trail" in an area where "being concerned about being a criminal victim in your home should be right up there with other things that aren't going to happen to you" and I realize that the only way those trails would ever be opened at night is if they were draped in cameras front to back and actively monitored. And, unfortunately, there's probably a plan to drape those trails in cameras and have them actively monitored. And they'll still keep them shut at night, especially since just a few years ago there was a brutal murder/assault of a young girl "in an area that hadn't seen something even close to that in half a century or so" (in daylight with people nearby).

[0] The date escapes me but may have been as far back as the late 90s

[1] Mostly handling major problems like downed trees; but I understand it was mowed or otherwise maintained in a manner that made it "already a concern for crime that hadn't crept up in a decade" due to some weed or beetle or something like that.