Abu Dhabi ranks as world’s safest city for the second year

Abu Dhabi has been named the safest city in the world for the second year running by Numbeo, a website that curates and collates user-contributed data.

The UAE capital’s safety index rose from 86.46 points for the first half of last year to 88.26 points during the first six months of this year. With a rating of 11.74 on the crime index, the emirate topped the mid-year ranking which included 338 cities in total.

The safety index is an estimation of overall safety levels in any given city or a country. If a city has a high safety index, it is considered very safe.

For the crime index, levels lower than 20 are considered very low (indicating a low crime rate and higher safety), levels between 20 and 40 are low, between 40 and 60 are moderate, between 60 and 80 are high and crime levels higher than 80 are considered as being very high.

Abu Dhabi was followed by Doha (Qatar) and Osaka (Japan), with Singapore and Basel (Switzerland) rounding off the top five on the safety index.

Dubai ranked 11th overall with a safety index score of 81.80 and a crime index rating of 18.20.

Among other GCC cities, Muscat (Oman) ranked 47, Manama (Bahrain) was placed 57, Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) stood at the 98th spot and Kuwait City (Kuwait) ranked 107.

Makkah (168), Jeddah (205) and Dammam (228) were the other Saudi cities that featured on the list.

Saif Saeed Ghobash, undersecretary at the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, said: “Safety is paramount when choosing a city to visit or live and work in and we are proud to be the top of the list for the second year running.

“Our capital’s strong reputation for safety and a virtually crime-free society is a testament to the ongoing efforts to establish the Emirate as a destination of distinction with international standards of safety.”

Numbeo, established in 2009, is a collaborative online database which enables users to share and compare information about the cost of living between countries and cities.

To create the safety index, the company says it “filters surveys to eliminate potential spam, like people entering a large amount of data which are differentiating from the median value.”

“We use data up to 36 months old. We include only cities for which there are at least a certain number of contributors,” it states.