To begin routing check out the live app here!
A Collaborative Mapping Web-App
Welcome to the Safer Route repository! Safer Route is a collaborative mapping web application designed to enhance safety awareness for pedestrians by providing insights into the perceived safety of urban roads, paths, and routes. This README will guide you through the project, its goals, features, and how to contribute.
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Safer Route aims to empower users with the ability to make informed decisions about their routes in urban areas by leveraging data from various sources to assess the safety of different road segments and paths. The web-app combines both environmental data such as lighting levels from street lamps as well as user feedback on route safety. This collaborative approach ensures that the safety information provided reflects real user ratings and is up-to-date.
This is a pilot app that was developed over the course of roughly 3 weeks. All user safety ratings are randomly generated and do not reflect real safety scores. Additionally, the perception of safety as we outline here should not be taken as a definition of safety, rather this reflects our own biases and thoughts on safety. We hope that this app can jumpstart conversations on safety across genders, sexualities, and identities and that one day we all have the right to the city at all hours of the day without any fear for our safety or others!
The core feature of Safer Route is its interactive map interface. Users can generate routes based on different parameters for quickest routes, safest routes, or the brightest routes as well as explore urban areas, view different road segments, paths, and ways, and assess their safety levels based on color-coded indicators.
Safer Route aggregates data from various sources, including public street light databases and user-generated ratings. This data is then transformed into road segment level data to allow for routing based on individual road segment characteristics such as user generated safety scores and brightness.
Users can contribute to the safety perception assessment by rating and reviewing routes. This collaborative aspect allows individuals to share their experiences and insights, contributing to the overall safety evaluation. The goal here is that over time the wisdom of the masses will prevail and will generate an accurate reflection of nighttime road safety across cities.
Based on user preferences and safety concerns, Safer Route can suggest alternative routes that prioritize shortest distance, route safety ratings, or route brightness. This helps users make well-informed decisions when planning their journeys.
The safety score for each road segment is calculated by taking the average of all user safety ratings for that segment. This score is updated every time a user rates their route. For instance, if a user travels from Point A to Point B via Road Segments X, Y, and Z, and gives the route a score of 8, the ratings for Road Segments X, Y, and Z will be updated with a new average safety scores based on all previous ratings as well as this new rating. The goal of the safety score is to reflect a collaborative consensus of the safety and comfort of road segments at night.
The brightness score is based on the density of street lamps per road segment as compared to other segments of its road type. I.e. Street A is a secondary road so we calculate its brightness score as a z-score based on the mean and standard deviation of all secondary road segments in the city then transform the z-score to a percentile rank which is diplayed as a score between 1-10. For example, a road segment with a brightness z-score of 3 will have a percentile rank of 99.87 which will be displayed as a brightness score of 9.9. Whereas a road segment with a z-score of 0 will have a percentile rank of 50 and a displayed brightness score of 5, as a z-score of 0 means the route sits right at the mean brightness of road segments of its respective type. This allows us to describe the brightness of a road segment relatively to other road segments of its type in each respective city.
Please find all of the instructions here: setup.md