Show HN: Find the safest well lit walking route between two locations
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Two of the locations that were memorably the most dangerous-seeming were some of the best-lit, and they weren't lit because they were high-crime.
Some other factors to consider in what's safe and/or feels safe:
* The presence of houses on the sidewalk (with people in them who might hear you, and doors you could go bang on), even if the street is dark except for the occasional porch light or glow through the drapes.
* Presence of open businesses (restaurants, hotels, cafes, hospitals, donut shops), which are pretty obviously places you can run into, where there will be other people.
* On the other side of open businesses being good... people outside of nightlife businesses can be risky, and sometimes feel risky. (Usually innocuous here, but walk enough, and you'll eventually encounter drunk people looking to fight, and also see people looking to prey upon someone from the concentration of candidates out late at night. And you'll read news reports of criminal score-settling with gunshots, outside some of the bars/clubs you walk past every night.)
* Office buildings with visible security guard desk in the lobby. In practice, I think they could only phone the police while you're getting stabbed against their glass wall, but the witness will discourage some attackers, and it seemed much more reassuring than an empty skyscraper lobby on a completely deserted downtown street.
* Possibly: Unlocked lobby/vestibule front doors of apartment buildings, which aren't obviously reassuring like an open business with people inside, but (if you paired this info with tips) can be used by walkers to thwart attackers.
* Street crime data.
(I should add that I'm white and male, and I know other groups of people face additional threats on the street, but I don't know how my experience applies to that.)
* Pedestrian traffic - busier streets with more people mean less likely to be mugged vs the empty side street.
Is that the right thing to do?
I guess there's still some subjectivity in that interpretation. But given that lights can be directly mapped, I think capturing whether there is lighting on the segment is a sensible way to do the quest.
If you want, I can help you find the ones you already marked, just send me an email.
Is this actually a common occurrence in America? How do people put up with this?
Like a lot of things on HN, it might be a SV thing that I'm simply unaware of.
VC Twitter likes suggesting that SF has practically surrendered to criminality and that the city is among the world’s worst-governed. I had suspected that this might be a pretty one-sided view of things, but perhaps it’s really true and SF (& SV if we consider it to include SF) truly are that dangerous.
One common strategy is to not carry anything of obvious value, don’t wear jewelry or watches or fancy clothes, don’t walk with your cell phone out. Basically don’t look like an easy target.
[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:lit
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dstreet_lam...
Are you also of the opinion that you can't buy used phones?
Depends, if you want a throwaway phone for a call or two that are not important, go ahead.
But if you're looking for a phone you'll keep for multiple years and you want the least possible risk of being tracked by someone else than who made your phone, then I would absolutely not buy a used phone.
Small problem as OK phones can be bought for ~$100 or less in most parts of the world.
“His problem was that the postcode for his east London flat was incorrect on Google Maps, so any driver using the service for navigation ended up not at his address, but in parkland at Three Mills Green, Bromley-by-Bow, half a mile away as the crow flies, but a mile and a half to drive.
What was an easily fixable error resulted in three years of frustration for Borghs, who first noticed the problem when an Uber driver took a wrong turn when taking him home.”
I have a friend where this could apply.
He concludes crime goes up because we have a connection to the full moon rather than the extra lighting.
His article was written decades ago. I suspect today he'd change that idea given the better data available.
Personally I think adding lighting to cities makes personal safety far better. I get what the studies are doing but I think they are relying on novelty to get published over boring.
But certainly you have to watch putting someone down a well-lit underpass over crossing a not so well-lit busy road.
I think the value to the data is for councils to find where lighting should be improved. Plus there's also more to safety than just crime.
There is no mobile app only a simple web app. But we also considered crash data from the German government which could be important. Additionally with GraphHopper walking routes avoid bigger streets and consider many signals from OpenStreetMap data. My personal route would probably just to avoid some dark parks to be honest as every detour is ugly.
And so a nice feature is the customizable routing where you can change your preferences per request because it is not clear if a longer detour along lamps is really safer if it is twice the length and at which point your personal preferences are or how you wish to mix other signals into the cost function of the route.
Check out the next release soon that will get a heavily improved customization feature: https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/pull/2209
Crowds are a decent security by obscurity mechanism, but only if you blend in. If you code as an outsider (e.g. a Japanese tourist in West Philly), then bustle might be a bug not a feature. More potential predators' attention to catch.
More likely a jumpy or purse clutching individual who is oblivious to their surroundings will stand out to perps.
What an excellent opportunity for consistency by certain worldviews.
Given the market share Google Maps has, the economic fallout from them suddenly avoiding certain areas deemed "unsafe" could swing billions of dollars annually from one set of businesses to another.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/01/25/145337346/this-app-was-made-f...
More seriously there are some serious ethical concerns people are missing here.
> For this hackathon we used data about whether a street is lit or not from Open Street Map. Later we could incorporate official UK gov data about street lighting or even incorporate satellite imaging data.
Google should just build this feature in.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...
The idea makes sense in some abstract theoretical way, but in practice this will simply reflect the biases of users by representing the subjective "sketchiness" of (typically) poorer areas, leading to gentrified travel routes that siphon yet more business away from communities who could really use it.
My area is probably not representative of most Nextdoor communities however
I am only speaking out because I get the sense from this community (and having worked in the tech industry for long enough) that such externalities are not really considered when designing apps like this one. The other comments give a hint to the proportion of time that these concerns and issues are discussed.
I see all the time only the consideration of "could" without any regard for "should".
while it's important not to conflate "poor" with "unsafe", I don't think it's unreasonable or unfair for individuals to try to avoid walking around in areas with a higher rate of violent crime. as long as the service makes a good faith attempt at objectivity, I don't feel there is anything wrong with a service providing this sort of information. crime maps might be a good place to start looking for data.
I could share with you many stories from FAANG privacy compliance groups about how little engineers think about the impacts of their releases.
I wonder what's been up with the project and why the sudden activity? Have you been doing anything cool behind the scenes?
If you still like the topic of path finding you can checkout GraphHopper - we always look for contributors :)
So just to echo what karussell says: GraphHopper seem like a great team, with wonderful tech and friendly people. So if you have an interest in maps, it's worth chatting to them!
In case you plan to move this from hackathon experiment to real product, to me the second letter in the logo splash (first image in the readme) looks like an "l" instead of the "r" that it's supposed to be. So I first read it as "BlightPath" which is probably not desired.
> Clean geojson to remove dark pathways.
Doesn't this eliminate routes with tradeoffs? e.g., cutting through a small park or alleyway may not be so risky (the other end is visible, both ends are well lit) while the alternative route may be very long in comparison?
Only a ridiculously privileged and sheltered person would think these things are somehow mutually exclusive. I can hear all the hardworking immigrants in rough neighborhoods rolling their eyes.
I don't understand why some people talk as if compassion entails complete vulnerability. Seems like a lot of grandstanding.
Living in Californian cities I've come to realize that homelessness should be illegal.
I sort of expected this to be the "draw the rest of the owl" step, but apparently "Lit" is actually a property of the geojson data! Very interesting.
I guess usage relates to safety.
Are the application actively recording light intensity? Are they coming from open-data?
> For this hackathon we used data about whether a street is lit or not from Open Street Map. Later we could incorporate official UK gov data about street lighting or even incorporate satellite imaging data.
It sounds like getting the data right wasn't the focus yet:
> Later we could incorporate many other kinds of data such as safe checkpoints trivially. The core technical challenge was wrangling the data and writing our own custom routing algorithm.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:lit
The highway=street_lamp tag indicates that there is a lamppost (which can be a navigational aid), but is a much more detailed form of mapping that should be used in addition to the lit-key on the ways themselves.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x0ae1/was_t...