Did you hear the news? Boston is the safest city in America for pedestrians.

Anyone who has tried to cross Rutherford Avenue from City Square, the intersection of Congress and State streets, or plain old Charles Circle probably thought Boston was the most dangerous city in America for pedestrians. But there it was last week reported by the Globe, based on a study by the advocacy group Transportation for America. Any Bostonian who has darted across the street between moving cars, tried to outfox the city’s pedestrian buttons or decided that the walk signal would never come will be incredulous. How can safety come from the streetside anarchy that is Boston?

But apparently anarchy breeds safety. The dangerous cities for pedestrians are the well-ordered ones—Orlando and Miami, for example. In fact, the first four most dangerous cities are in Florida, with the fifth in California. These cities have well-planned, straight roads, striping that doesn’t go away with the road salt, and well-organized traffic signals placed by the latest theories of transportation management. Yet the planning and good order doesn’t foster safety.

It’s possible that Florida drivers kill more pedestrians because both the drivers and the pedestrians are old, with worn-down reflexes. But one would think the study would account for such things, as studies often do.

This study comes on the heels of one that New York Times columnist David Brooks reported about a year ago based on research by the same group. He revealed then that more pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jaywalking, vindicating all habitual jaywalkers, which is basically all Bostonians. Perhaps he provided a clue as to why Bostonians survive their chaotic streets better than most other Americans.

Brooks’s counter-intuitive theory was that order lulls people into thinking they are safer than they really are. He observed that people take more risks when they believe systems or devices are in place to protect them. He was making a point about risky oil drilling at the time of the BP disaster, but he also mentioned jaywalking as an example.

He must be onto something. Consider your own behavior at one of the crossings I mentioned. On Rutherford Avenue, you might be headed from Charlestown proper over to Paul Revere Park. And, while you probably wait for the light, the street is so threatening, with its cars panting at the stop light, that you’re on your guard. The intersection at Congress and State Street also tests your mettle, since the lights seem a bit arbitrary. So people dash across the streets in a seemingly willy-nilly fashion until you notice they’ve got an eagle eye out for everything from errant bicycles to charging UPS trucks about to approach them.

Take another location—Charles Circle. A lot of pedestrians grumble about that terrifying walk from the station to a safe landing on the other side of the street, but I can find no accidents there. Even though one of the walk lights is lit while cars think they have the right of way, and the cars and pedestrians are vying for space on the tarmac, people get across safely. I’m theorizing that the pedestrians are on guard, watching carefully for vehicles, and planning their strategy for getting across the road. They’re not a laid-back bunch when you look at them perched on the brick islands.

Recently at a neighborhood meeting, some participants lamented that traffic is slowed on Newbury and Charles streets because cars and trucks are double-parked. Some liked the idea that traffic was slowed. Others liked slower traffic, but wanted it to be slowed in a more rational way than having people break the law by parking in a travel lane. There’s a part of all of us that long for rationality, hoping that we’ll be able to predict consequences accurately. Rational thinking is comforting. You can follow a thought or a system from beginning to end.

But what if it doesn’t make any difference? What if, in fact, rational planning, as is practiced by the newer cities with room to practice it, is sometimes counterproductive to safety, not to mention other goals?

In Boston in the 1950s our civic leaders determined rationally that Scollay Square and the old West End had to go. I never met anyone when I first moved to Boston who questioned that decision.

Looking back, people now value the chaos of the old West End as more enjoyable, safer and more neighborly than its replacement. Who knows if that is really true? But what does seem apparent is that sometimes planning and orderliness work against what we intend to do. The problem is understanding why and how it works. Maybe in Boston if we had logical traffic lights, no jaywalkers and a predictable grid of streets more of us would be dead by now.