Safe Steps

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  Safe Steps Home Screen

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  Users can enter their current location and desired destination.

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  The safest route is calculated, and areas with past crime occurrences are also displayed.

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  Clicking on a red dot provides further information about the crime, including date and type of offense.

Inspiration

Over 50,000 crimes were reported in San Francisco in 2023, with the majority occurring at night time. This poses a challenge for those wishing to walk and travel outside alone when it is dark, especially women, who were subject to 76% of crimes. This encouraged me to build Safe Steps, an application to let you know the safest way to get to your destination.

What it does

Safe Steps lets you know exactly what crimes occurred along the route from your location to your desired destination, and recommends safer routes to take instead.

How I built it

I used the Open Route Services API alongside Leaflet and Turf.js to build the backend to classify route safety, creating a threshold for routes to display past crimes using publicly available data from the city of San Francisco.

Challenges I ran into

It was difficult to built the bounding box around the route to display crimes that occurred nearby because of the sheer amount of data in the API. I had to add numerous filters including the date of the crime as well as assign different crimes different "weights" to determine which ones were serious enough to display, and which were simply misdemeanors.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of being able to have the entire website deployed and have the presentation on time, especially since I don't have much experience solo hacking.

What I learned

I learned how to manage an entire project as a solo hacker, and how to structure my time. I also realized that it was a better idea to map out/draw what I wanted to create instead of jumping straight into coding, as it provided more structure and made my life easier in the long run.

What's next for Safe Steps

In the future, I'd like Safe Steps to be working in all metropolitan areas and major cities, such as NYC, Chicago, Boston, etc. Additionally, users would be able to have the option to select different routes to travel. I'd also like to add support for bikers and possibly drivers. Another useful feature could be adding an emergency button for unsafe situations to alert emergency contacts, and a way to connect people traveling over similar routes to increase safety as traveling in a group is always a better idea.

Built With

• leaflet.js
• openrouteservice
• react
• tailwind
• typescript
• vite