Public transportation—a primary routine activity setting—is shown in this article to cancel temporarily the effect of segregated social interactions (by bringing together individuals who usually do not meet) and to modify locally the basic demographic weight of social groups with unequal offending rates. As a result, the prevalence of interracial violent offenses is found to be higher in subway stations than elsewhere in the urban landscape. To the extent that routine activity arrangements alter the impact on crime levels of fundamental social structure parameters, such findings suggest that patterns in the circulation of people and property in social space be added to the limited list of basic or antecedent determinants of aggregate crime distributions.
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