I’ve very rarely felt afraid to be alone. Right now I live in the state with the lowest crime rate in the US so my only worry about being out alone at night comes from the worry about being hit by a car (we have no sidewalks and few streetlights here), but I was never too bothered when I lived in cities either, even though they weren’t “nice” ones.
The only night I’ve felt at all unnerved was a rainy night in Boston, but even then I was more afraid because I was lost and worried I’d miss my ride home than of anyone I encountered.
I’ve been to very few places where I was afraid to walk alone - and those were places where I wouldn’t have felt comfortable surrounded by three burly guys, either.
I wouldn’t say I’m afraid walking alone at night, but I am very aware of my surroundings and the people near me, and I take small actions to stay in the safest ‘zone’ possible. This includes casually crossing the street if a single man is walking behind me for more than a block or two, not making eye contact with people, taking the open route by the illuminated all-night corner shops instead of the fenced-in one by the Tube tracks, etc.
Nowadays most cars have maybe 6 inches of ground clearance … it would have to be a pretty skinny man to fit under there… heck, I dont think you could easily crawl under my chevy s10 and manage to jump out at someone …
It really depends on the place. At my undergraduate university the neighborhood was like a war zone - there were daily muggings and one woman was sexually assaulted in broad daylight in the art building courtyard. Another woman had her car window smashed in while she was waiting at a stoplight - again, in broad daylight. I didn’t travel with other people, but I rode my bike if I knew I was going to be going home after dark, and I most definitely had my keys out if I had to walk from the bus stop to my apartment building after dark. In my opinion, behaving this way is common sense rather than paranoia if there is genuine danger. (ETA - The university advised men to take these precautions as well as women; in their frequent e-mails exhorting us to have Campus Police escort us home, they specified that they expected lone men to be escorted as well as lone women.)
In the city where I live now (in England) I walk around after dark with headphones on almost every night and have never been nervous about it. It’s a completely different atmosphere, and the precautions I used to take in my old city would be silly here.
Location, location, location. There are places that I have no sense of fear about and there are places where I’m on my guard. And there are places you couldn’t pay me to walk, day or night. I got a bad vibe once in Chicago and moved out to the middle of the street where it was brighter and more difficult for me to be pulled into an alley or gangway. At 90 pounds, I was perfect target who could very easily be picked up and carried off no matter how hard I fought. But we all have to live our lives. I choose to be aware and analytical about my surroundings rather than live in fear. Shit happens, but that doesn’t mean we can’t function.
I walk around alone all the time. Way past the point most people would deem sensible, actually. I only recall something sketchy happening once (I was walking past a park and a car started following me slowly. After a while, it just drove off. Wierd.)
I don’t feel unsafe. Guys are in way more danger out on the streets than women are anyway. Cite (an Australian one, but I think the pattern is fairly general)
I have few issues with walking around on my own at night and rarely feel afraid (I’m a country bumpkin living in the city so I’m maybe slightly more cautious than someone who has grown up in the city). In winter it’s dark when I walk to and from work through some rough areas and isolated streets; I’ve been doing it for long enough without incident that I don’t feel I have a reason to be scared.
I live in the East End of Glasgow and would say I’m probably safer than most of the men in the area. Whilst I have never been attacked, I have many male friends who have been assaulted for no other reason than they happened to be walking by another male/group of males who were looking for a fight.
My neighborhood is a place where I try to be aware at all times but mostly I feel pretty safe there, especially since they caught that rapist that was running around last month.
Not at all. I have never checked my backseat for rapists.
Not at all. I’ll walk anywhere, jog in the countryside, and hike in the woods. If no one wants to go with me, I go alone.
Intellectually, I recognize that I could probably stand to be a bit more careful - locking the doors when I’m home alone, not hiking off trails by myself, etc. I’m just not. I only lock my doors out of concern that someone will steal my stuff. Anytime I do something to make myself safer in an unsafe situation, it’s because I know that if something were to happen to me while I was doing something unsafe, I’d never hear the end of it from my parents.
Oddly enough, I don’t like walking outside my house at night, but that’s because I’m afraid of the boogeyman.
Pretty much what Kalhoun said, look at the situation logically. Your bearing and attitude really do make a big difference; I learned the “I’m confident and don’t need any crap” look. Unfortuately, seems I can’t turn it off for people I’d like to meet.
As many people have said, not afraid, but I also take reasonable precautions – I walk briskly and confidently and take the best-lit, most-traveled streets at night. There are also, definitely, neighborhoods in Philly where I wouldn’t be comfortable walking alone at night – but since I generally don’t have business there in the daytime either, that doesn’t interfere with my life in any way.
I live in a fairly small town and never feel afraid, even after dark. To be honest, I rarely walk around town unless I’m walking my dog (puppy, very much non-aggressive and probably wouldn’t do anything to save me. If someone was attacking me he’d probably join in thinking we were playing).
I do most of my walking at the state parks, and one of them I go to is very underused. I was there yesterday and didn’t see another person the whole 2 hours I was walking the wooded trails. When I do come across people (men) in these situations I am a little wary - there is no one within shouting distance, as the parks I frequent are 2000+ acres. But I still do it because I like walking in the woods better than walking down the streets.
The “I’m confident and don’t need any carp” look also helps scare off aggressive fishmongers.
I find it a bit… sad? disappointed? that some of the advice women mention following here (walk in the bright areas, be alert) is given with a tone of “if I were man, I wouldn’t have to worry about this” or “I’m a woman, so I HAVE to be alert/walk in the bright areas in strange neighborhoods/walk with confidence/etc.”
No, it is not. Both of those are things everyone should do, not just women. 
I did not include the “look under car/backseat” thing because, IMHO, that is ridiculous and won’t statistically help you.
It’s all situation-dependent, though I can’t say I’ve ever been literally scared of going out by myself. Aware it’s maybe not the brightest idea a few times, but not actually scared.
Where I grew up, and most of the places I’ve lived as an adult, it’s totally not an issue. Hell, there are a lot of nights I don’t remember to lock the door before bed where we live now. We live in the most densely populated area of our small town, with 5 houses about 30 seconds from our front door and exactly one way in and out–across a one-lane bridge. When the weather’s nice, I frequently go for a walk alone around 10 or so and have been known to go as late/early as 3am. I try not to go at times like that very often, though, because it gets people’s dogs barking and disturbs the neighbors.
I do generally avoid that one wooded stretch of the loop where there are no street lights and all the houses are way up the nearly vertical hill from the road after full dark. There’s no sidewalk or even shoulder, and no lights except the security lights on the houses up the hill. It would be easy to fall or get run over, or for some stupid jackass to throw something at you or otherwise start trouble without anybody seeing or hearing. If you got seriously hurt on that stretch, you better have a cell phone with you or be prepared to wait a while for someone to find you and summon help.
When we vacation in large cities, I don’t think anything of us splitting up and going off on my own during the day. At night, it’s a moot point, because we always have dinner and go do something together.
Now, when I lived in that apartment with the bars on the windows in a business district right up from the projects, I typically didn’t go walking at night without the dog. During the day, when there were lots of people around, I walked all over the place if the weather was decent. But at night the place was mostly deserted, and it didn’t seem like a smart idea to go taking a constitutional by myself.
And yes, when I was a teenager driving my parents’ big boat of a car that you actually could slide under, when I was walking through a nearly empty lot at night I did typically approach the car at an angle so I could see under it without crouching, and glance into the back seat when I was still a few steps away. It’s not something I would do with a car you couldn’t slide under or one that had an alarm, though; that would be silly.
I’ve never felt scared to walk home alone. Sure, I make sure I’m paying attention to my surroundings and have a 911 speed dial on my cell, but that’s just common sense. I’m prepared, not scared.
When I first moved out on my own, I was 21… back then, I had a part-time retail job just barely above minimum wage that wouldn’t cover rent in a nicer parts of town, so I lived in some pretty rough areas.
Sure, there was a fair bit of crime in those areas, but it usually involved people who were attached to local gangs or dealing drugs. In my case, I was probably safer than most because the local dealers didn’t want the kind of police attention that would come from a young white female getting attacked in their neighbourhood… so they were actually VERY nice to me and kept an eye out for me (one of them used to give me crap for smoking because it was bad for my health, which I thought was hilarious coming from a guy dealing Og-knows-what on the corner). Strange, but true.
In fact, the only time I did get worried was the time a drunken lout tried to follow me home… and that was several years later, when I’d moved into a well-to-do downtown neighbourhood that most people would consider to be on the “very safe” side of the scale. Go figure. (He took off when I told him that I was most definitely not interested in getting to know him better, and that if he didn’t step off, he’d be getting to know the cops a whole lot better)
To walk around on my own? Almost never scared, and those times when I <i>am</i> scared, it has nothing to do with being a woman, it’s because this New Yorker is somehow walking around alone at night in the country which is obviously where serial killers, aliens, and the Children of the Corn are likely to be found (you didn’t specify <i>rational</i> fear).
I’m rarely afraid when I walk by myself alone at night, but then again, the neighborhood I live in now is a very safe one. The couple of times I was afraid, I was in a relatively nice neighborhood bordering on a bad one and followed by a group of men yelling at me about what they were going to do to me or mugged at gunpoint in the university parking lot. In the latter situation, I ducked into the nearest public place and called someone to pick me up while the manager called the cops. The guys waited outside for a while, but the cops drove by with their lights on and they scattered. In the former situation, well - I gave him my purse and was fortunate he didn’t drive off with me in my car. In both situtaions, I felt like something was wrong before it even happened, so I’ve learned to trust my instinct.
I will admit that I do occasionally feel a little irrational twinge of unease now and then, but I’m a firm believer that a couple of crappy situations shouldn’t force me to cower inside for the rest of my life.