Safety Mode for Google Maps

Inspiration

All of our team members have experienced feeling unsafe walking home alone at night. Google Maps sometimes leads you through empty roads, dark parks etc.. Those are routes that could be easily avoided and have a major impact on perceived safety. As women in tech, we feel that we have the ability and therefore also the responsibility to create a system and community that allows both women and men to feel safe while walking at night.

What it does

Our idea is to introduce a so-called “safety mode” to the Google Maps system. This safety mode chooses a route based on its “safety” rather than on time or distance. This feature has been missing from the application so far. The idea is to choose the path that goes through streets full of restaurants, shops and does not include walking through parks or small streets as they tend to be empty of people at night and feel unsafe.

How we built it

We built a website demo to visualize how our feature could look like. It allows the user to compare the safest and fastest route for different examples. We used different maps-APIs provided by Google to show how the feature couldbe integrated into the existing application and also to show how the rich data provided by Google could be used to increase safety.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge for us was that none of us have ever participated in a hackathon so we had to figure out how to structure our project. Another challenge was that three of us have never programmed in JavaScript. At the beginning using the Google Cloud platform was quite overwhelming. Integrating the APIs into our website was also a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our idea because we think it is innovative and has a lot of potential. This feature could become a part of our daily life and affect a lot of people in a positive way by making them feel safer. We are also proud to have managed to build a running website.

What we learned

how to work as a team
use everyone's potential to its fullest
work with Google-APIs

What's next for Safety Mode for Google Maps

integrate the feature into the mobile application
allow user to show shops/restaurants along the way during their opening hours
emergency feature: calls family/friends or police without having to leave the application