CITYPulse

Inspiration

Our initial idea was to make a tool that would help public transit users plan a safer commute. A user would enter a location they want to commute to and our tool will present multiple routes with a safety rating for each. The platform would also show recent safety incidents that occurred along a route along with a feature for users to report public safety incidents. We decided to transform our platform into a tool for understanding everything going on in the city, not just public safety incidents.

What it does

We combine the functionality of multiple apps that New Yorkers rely on to get around the city into one platform. CITYPulse displays a map of NYC with pins that display events, public safety incidents, public bathrooms, and quests (NeighborFavors).

Events are represented by green pins, they represent events that are being planned and are categorized into sports, music, arts, food, community, and outdoors. Users can click/tap on these pins and see a small display with the events information and a summary provided by Google Gemini.

Public safety incidents are represented by red pins, they provide information on every type of public safety incident from crime to traffic accidents to fires. This is meant to keep users informed of dangerous events in their vicinity.

Public bathrooms are represented by blue pins that indicate the location of public bathrooms. This is a convenience feature, when travelling through the city, you never know when you need to go.

NeighborFavors are a special feature of our app. Users can post a NeighborFavor that will show up on the map as yellow pins. When clicked on, they display a user-written description of the task to be done along with the number of people requested for the quest. Other uses will see this pin on their map and when enough people accept the quest, its pin will be removed from the map.

Our transit safety tool helps users select any location on the map and view different routes to get to that location using public transportation. Each route is given a safety score and a list of public safety incidents that occurred along the route.

The app also includes a recommended events feed as well as a news feed. Recommended events helps users browse through events we think they'll be interested in, saving them from clicking all over the map to find events. The news feed gives them a quick summary of important news happening across the city.

How we built it

We used Expo and React Native to create a cross-platform mobile app for Android and iOS. We used Firebase for our database and authentication, along with Google Maps API and Gemini API. We sourced our data for public safety incidents, public bathrooms, and events from public datasets like NYPD Complaint Data (YTD) (via NYC Open Data SODA API), NYC Special Events Permits dataset (street fairs and permitted public gatherings), along with a feature for users to upload their own events or report incidents.

Challenges we ran into

A big struggle was keeping the UI consistent across the mobile and web versions. Our map also was over-cluttered with the amount of different pins that appear across the city so we implemented a feature for the map to center and zoom around the users current location, so only the closest pins would be displayed.

Another issue was coordinating across the entire team, there were a lot of different feature ideas and we had to arbitrage what to include and what to leave out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that CITYPulse is something that solves a real problem. We can easily envision ourselves and other New Yorkers using this app in their day-to-day lives.

What we learned

We learned that the decisions we took to exclude certain features helped our app just as much as the decisions taken to include features. Knowing when to stop building features is an important skill. We also learned that shifting our tool from a safety focused one to a community centered one changed how people reacted to it.

What's next for CITYPulse

We plan to build out user verification to ensure our users live in NYC and to help prevent people from abusing the features that allow users to add pins to the map for everyone to see.

We also plan to launch this app on Google Play and have real users try out a more polished version.

Finally, we think our app can be useful to any city and plan to expand to other major cities in the US.