Safemaps

Find Safer ways to Travel!

Comment

Inspiration

I was walking home from my new internship at Cars24 one evening when Google Maps led me down a dark, empty road with only stray dogs around. I got really scared and thought, "What if there was someone local who could tell me the safer way to go?" That fear turned into an idea - what if we could make maps that actually care about keeping people safe, not just getting them there fast?

What it does

Safemaps helps you find the safest route to your destination. Instead of just showing the fastest way, it looks at things like:

  • How well-lit the streets are
  • Whether there are people around or it's deserted
  • If accidents happen often in that area
  • Recent crime reports
  • Weather conditions
  • Road quality and infrastructure

Then it gives each route a safety score so you can choose the one that feels right for you. It's especially helpful for women, kids, and anyone traveling alone.

How we built it

I used several tools working together:

  • AI agents powered by Perplexity that search the internet for accident and crime data
  • Google Maps for the basic routing and street photos
  • Gemini AI to "look" at street images and tell me if they seem safe
  • Weather API for current conditions
  • A scoring system that combines all this info into a simple 0-100 safety score

Challenges we ran into

  • Making it work fast enough (it still takes about 10 seconds, which feels long)
  • Finding reliable, up-to-date information about accidents and crime
  • Figuring out how to weigh different safety factors - is no pedestrian activity worse than heavy traffic?
  • Making sure the system doesn't give false confidence about "safe" routes

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • I actually built something that could have helped me that scary night
  • It works! People can go to safemaps.fun and get real safety scores for their routes
  • I created something that could help other people avoid the fear I felt
  • It addresses a real problem that affects millions of people, especially women, children & solo travelers

What we learned

  • Building with AI is exciting but also frustrating when it doesn't work like you expect
  • Sometimes the simplest ideas (like "show me the safe way") are the hardest to build
  • Personal experiences make the best starting points for solving real problems
  • Even if it's not perfect, something that helps even a little bit is worth building

What's next for Safemaps

  • Enable contributions from users to improve safemaps like alternative safer routes, feedbacks, update the maps with latest data, etc.
  • Add a sos feature for emergencies

Built With

Share this project:

Updates