Service Levels & Income

How about this cliche fest. The Examiner writes about how San Franciscans are tougher than the rest of the bay area when it comes to walking to transit through high crime areas. But in reading it, some of the writing made me skeptical that this was a real study or whether people didn't just take stereotypes into the paper:

In places like Oakland, Berkeley and Sunnyvale, the high-crime neighborhoods tend to scare people away from using nearby transit services, the study found. Folks had a tendency to walk less in those neighborhoods, choosing to drive instead, according to a new study from the Mineta Transportation Institute.
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“In [San Francisco] neighborhoods where there was more crime, people were most likely to use transit,” said Dr. Christopher Ferrell, one of the study’s principal authors.
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He added that The City’s transit services tend to be located in high-density areas, which invariably attract crime.
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As expected, those who chose to live in suburban areas were more inclined to avoid walking in high-crime areas and using transit hubs within those areas. But even in a dense urban city such as Oakland, folks had a propensity to avoid public-transit hubs in high-crime neighborhoods.

Seems to me that this has nothing to do with crime but rather to do with transit service levels & income levels & self selection. What am I missing?