Amsterdam Manages to Retain Safety Ranking, Despite Problems

Amsterdam is now the fifth safest major city, according to The Economist’s Safe City Index, which assess a range of factor in 50 different cities all over the world.

Amsterdam’s 5th place positioned it just ahead of Sydney and Zurich, but behind Tokyo, Singapore, Osaka and Stockholm. It scored well for transport infrastructure but poorly for the provision of health care. For personal safety, it has dropped from 5th (in this limited list of just 50 cities) to 9th place. This reflects a sharp increase in the levels of violent crime in Amsterdam.

The same report also noted the rankings provided by other leading city indexes to create an overall “list of lists”. This ranked Amsterdam as the world’s 25th best city in which to live, which is still pretty good but not as good as previous years. For all our good, we hope that the city authorities can take a moment to notice this worrying slide and, perhaps, spend some time to think of ways to improve life here, rather than just coming up with innovative new ways to destroy all that is unique about Amsterdam.