SafePath

Inspiration

Polls and studies have shown that commuting in the city is a source of anxiety and mental distress. As students new to NYC, we're in the same boat. Commuting, especially at night can be a dangerous affair. As a result, we wanted to build something to help solve this problem and allow us (and everyone else) to travel with more peace of mind.

What it does

SafePath is a navigation app that leverages data from the NYPD crime database and satellite data (night light) to compute a risk score associated with the fastest routes provided by Google Maps. We also have ideas and the infrastructure to combine this with user responses as the the app grows in popularity. The user then gets to choose their desired route on the basis of both speed and safety.

How we built it

We used to Google Maps API to get the top public transit and walking routes in terms of speed. We used the NYPD crime database to obtain a CSV of all the crimes reported in a given time frame along with the level of offence and location they occurred. The Google Earth Engine in combination with the Google Cloud Platform was used to scrape night light data from the VIIRS satellite. These data sources were combined used pandas and numpy in Python to develop a "risk score" for every route given to us by the Google Maps API. The risk score aimed to minimise crime incidence and maximize the presence of night light.

Challenges we ran into

1) Getting the routes we wanted from the Google Maps API
2) Working with Google Earth Engine to leverage an unconventional data source
3) Generating interactive maps within our website
4) Coming up with a way to use multiple modalities

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Tackling a problem that we face personally
2) Working with and integrating multiple sources of data

What we learned

We learnt a number of new technologies and frameworks such as Flask, GCP, geopandas, etc.

What's next for SafePath

1) Use the user review system to validate user safety and leverage their data to power our recommendation engine
2) Work with more real-time data with Big Data tools
3) Mobile App development
4) Social media scraping for latest updates with regards to safety