Inspiration
I am an international student from India who moved to Seattle to pursue my Masters in August last year. Everything was new, and I didn't know the areas in Seattle nor which routes were the safest to take. I live in Redmond, about an hour from my university campus in Seattle, and most of my classes end late at night. Getting a bus at night in this new city was a bit difficult to get used to. One night, I had walked through a particular road in Downtown Seattle en route to the bus stop when I felt unsafe due to the ongoing drug crimes there. Later, I spoke with my advisor, who was surprised I had used that street at night and warned me against using it as it gets dangerous at night. This experience served as the inspiration to make this web app to help people navigate through cities with the knowledge of crimes that occur in those neighborhoods.
What it does
Apart from doing what Google Maps does of finding the fastest route to the destination, this map will also show users the crimes prevalent in the neighborhood in a 2km radius. Thus helping the users make good decisions on whether it is safe to use the suggested route or take the longer path. The dataset used in the map is updated by the Seattle Police Department daily. Hence the user will get the latest updates on the crimes in their routes.
How we built it
I used React for the front end and MongoDB to store the data as I didn't want the data preprocessing to happen on the client side on the users' devices. I've also added a backend using node.js which will fetch data from https://data.seattle.go, cluster all the crimes in a 2km radius of a neighborhood, and save it into the DB.
MERN stack was used for the project.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge I encountered was creating this project as Open-Source as possible without using paid APIs. I had to find alternatives such as Leaflet, Geocoder from Jawg, etc. Integrating all of these Open-Source APIs was also a challenge.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This project has always been at the back of my mind, and this platform motivated me to work on it. I am happy I was able to complete this project. I consider being able to provide users with a website that they can use to find the safest routes to their destination as one of the accomplishments in this project.
What we learned
I have earned a lot of new Open-Source software and how to work on a project in a time crunch.
What's Next for Know Your Seattle's Ways
Currently, the app works for routes within Seattle. In the future, I would like to expand the area covered in the website and add more cities. As of now, I found Chicago and LA posting their crime data online. It would be great to add these cities going forward.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.