SFWalk

SFWalkLogo
Home Page
About Us Page

Small segment from the CA government https://www.ots.ca.gov/media-and-research/campaigns/pedestrian-safety/

CDC perspective and website https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/index.html

Safety manual for pedestrians https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/pedestrian-safety-a-road-safety-manual-for-decision-makers-and-practitioners

Safe routes for children to walk to school https://www.saferoutesinfo.org/

CDC perspective of walking and climate change https://www.cdc.gov/climateandhealth/default.htm

Inspiration

A few of us grew up with the expectation to walk to and from school. Depending on where you live, walking to some destination may consist of walking along or across busy roads. For our parents, the idea of us as kids crossing a busy intersection was not allowed and was met with instructions to take the back roads to our destination. Although this reroute was inconvenient time wise, it allowed us to travel to our destination in a safer manner.

According to the California Government, there is a growing number of pedestrians getting injured or killed on the California roads. Whether walking to school, for exercise, or for fun, no one should worry about walking outside. Pedestrians are vulnerable when walking along roads, but our website, SFwalk, aims to take the first step into discussing this current issue and preventing it from further growth.

What it does

Given the starting point and destination, SFwalk finds the safest route to travel to avoid car collisions or any possible automotive issues. This website is perfect for younger potential users walking to and from school or people who are just looking for a safe stroll in the neighborhood. Car collisions and automotive faults can occur anywhere especially in the neighborhood where residents are non-suspecting for a potential issue to arise.

How we built it

We used a python backend in order to grab routing info from Inrix. We used Inrix’s findRoute API where we asked for as many possible routes as possible. We also used an API from Geonames which grabbed the nearest intersection from our starting position. We got our Crash data from https://data.sfgov.org/ in which we got crashes along all blocks and intersections. We gave each block and intersection a normalized score based on how the rate for crashes and how much they involved pedestrians and were fatal. Then we averaged all the intersections and block ratings for a potential path to get our rating for its danger. We then used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to make the front-end. Users are able to visit the website, use our application, and view the route through an interactive map pulled through Google Maps API. The web design layout was simple and plain, getting to the main function of the website. Using the google maps API allowed us to display an interactive map of San Francisco on our website, and also allowed us to create the routes. To create the routes, we would have to know the coordinates of each intersection where a turn or direction is made, and set a waypoint for each one. After there are no more intersections until the destination is reached, we would connect each waypoint with a polyline showing the optimal and safest route between the two locations.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of trouble just getting started, using new technologies like Flask which made the process a lot more arduous than we imagined. It was specifically challenging figuring out how to best organize the functions we were making, and how to add each into the Flask web application. This was a struggle, especially because of a misunderstanding we had between the authorization token and how it was affecting possible outputs in our Flask web application. We also had trouble finding a path between blocks as they were not in order so we had to write code to find a path between two intersections