VIA | Devpost

Boston Crime Map
Alternative Walking Routes For Safer Walking

Inspiration

Crime rates are on the rise across America, and many people, especially women, fear walking alone at night, even in their own neighborhoods. When we first came to MIT, we all experienced some level of harassment on the streets. Current navigation apps do not include the necessary safety precautions that pedestrians need to identify and avoid dimly-lit, high-crime areas.

What it does

Using a combination of police crime reports and the Mapbox API, VIA offers users multiple secure paths to their destination and a user-friendly display of crime reports within the past few months. Ultimately, VIA is an app that provides up-to-date data about the safety of pedestrian routes.

How we built it

We built our interactive map with the Mapbox API, programming functions with HTML and Javascript which overlays Boston police department crime data on the map and generates multiple routes given start and end destinations.

Challenges we ran into

We had some difficulty with instruction banners at the end of the hackathon that we will definitely work on in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

None of us had much experience with frontend programming or working with APIs, and a lot of the process was trial and error. Creating the visuals for the maps in such a short period of time pushed us to step out of our comfort zones. We'd been ideating this project for quite some time, so actually creating an MVP is something we are very proud of.

What we learned

This project was the first time that any of us actually built tangible applications outside of school, so coding this in 24-hours was a great learning experience. We learned about working with APIs and how to read the documentation involved in using them as well as breaking down data files into workable data structures. With all of us having busy schedules this weekend, it was also important to communicate properly so that we each new what our tasks were for the day as we weren't all together for a majority of the hackathon. However, we were all able to collaborate well, and we learned how to communicate effectively and work together to overcome our project challenges.

What's next for VIA

We plan on working outside of school on this project to hone some of the designs and make the navigation features with the data available beyond Boston. There are many areas that we can improve the design, such as making the application a mobile app instead of a web app, which we will consider working on in the future.