This is the winning project from the Take Back the Night Hackathon at the University of Virginia, hosted by the university's ACM-W chapter, Women in Computing Sciences. As part of Take Back the Night Week, an initiative dedicated to sexual assault and violence survivors, the hackathon was themed around creating projects that would address the issues at hand.

Our project, Best Way Back, is a service providing directions by recommending the safest walking routes. It uses the Google Maps API as well as government released historical crime data to find routes with the best safety rating we developed from analyzing the dataset.

The project can easily incorporate future improvements such as a better crime safety calculating algorithm as well as more datasets off which to base the ratings on.

In helping people feel more safe when they walk and be more aware of their surroundings, we hope to be able to contribute to everybody's personal right to safety, no matter where they are.

• Best Overall Hack
• Best User Experience Hack

Additional information available on Devpost.

Because our database is populated with government data from Chicago, the demo assumes that the user's location is in chicago (South of Harold Washington Playlot Park on the shore of Lake Michigan).

To see how the app works, enter a nearby location in Chicago (by address, name, or latitude/longitude) and watch Best Way Back calculate the optimal route. Check out the demo here.