Saathi

Inspiration

Maps apps show you the fastest way home, not the safest. For a lot of women in South Asia, the fastest option might be an almost-empty bus late at night or a stop where harassment is common. We found that 94% of women who take public transport in Bangladesh say they've been harassed on it (BRAC, 2018), and most of them never report it. We wanted to build something that takes that into account.

What it does

Saathi means "companion" in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. It's a route planner for women in Delhi, Karachi, Dhaka and Colombo.

• Safest route: compares the bus, an auto/app ride, and walking, and gives each one a safety score based on things like time of night, how empty the bus usually is, ladies' seats, and reports from other women.
• Report unsafe spots: tap the map to anonymously flag harassment, bad lighting, a broken panic button, etc. Routes update right away.
• Travel together: matches you with other women going the same way around the same time so you can share a ride or sit together on the bus. Others only see your rough location.
• SOS button with local emergency numbers.

How we built it

React and Leaflet on the frontend, and a Node/Express API on the backend. Walking and driving routes come from a free routing service (OSRM). The safety score starts at 100 and subtracts points for each risk.

Challenges we ran into

• We couldn't find bus data for South Asia, so the bus routes are mock data for the demo.
• It was hard to decide how to turn "feeling unsafe" into a number, so the score weights are basically our best guesses.
• We had to figure out how to match women without sharing their exact location.
• Our map stopped working partway through because the tile service started requiring an API key, so we had to switch providers.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how common harassment on public transport is and how little of it gets reported. We also learned how to work with maps and routing APIs, and how much privacy matters when you're building a safety app.

What's next

Real bus data, verified accounts for the buddy feature, live location sharing with friends and family, and more languages.

Built With

• express.js
• html
• javascript
• leaflet.js
• lucide
• node.js
• openstreetmap
• osrm
• react
• react-leaflet
• stadia-maps
• vite