A safer way to walk home.
A live safety overlay for the maps you already use — built first for Sheffield, designed to scale to every street.
The fastest route
is rarely the safest one.
Maps optimise for minutes. They don't tell you which streets are dim, deserted, or recently flagged for incidents.
…through 6 streets you've never used.
women in the UK change their route, time, or transport to avoid walking alone after dark.
Walked. Observed.
Tested with the city.
Sheffield's streets, walked at night.
14 test routes were walked between 8pm and midnight across Sheffield — Broomhill, Sharrow, Park Hill, Burngreave, the city centre. The scoring model was cross-referenced against ground truth: lighting gaps, isolated stretches, and junctions the data flagged but felt fine, and vice versa.
- Manually logged dark stretches the API undercounted
- Identified false-safe areas near well-lit but isolated roads
- Stress-tested the weightings against lived experience
A city already moving this way.
A working prototype and route data set was shared with Sheffield City Council's active travel team. The council is actively investing in walkability as part of its transport strategy — SafeWalk maps directly onto that agenda.
- Fargate — expanded pedestrianisation and public seating in the city centre
- Westbar roundabout — redesigned as a Dutch-style filtered junction, prioritising pedestrians and cyclists over through-traffic
- Active Travel Fund allocation for 2024–26, targeting connectivity and pedestrian safety across neighbourhoods
SafeWalk, live on the streets
of Sheffield.
Maps tell us how to walk —
not whether we should.
Speed, distance,
arrival time.
- Fastest route, no risk context
- No lighting visibility
- No incident-density awareness
- No time-of-day weighting
- Manual workarounds: friend texts, share-location
Route safety,
in the same glance.
- Colour-coded path: safe / moderate / unsafe
- Streetlight density along the way
- Live local crime data from open APIs
- One ring, one score — readable in a second
- Sits inside Maps. No app to switch to.
SafeWalk paints safety
onto the map you already use.
A simple formula,
weighted by reality.
Three free APIs.
No keys, no licences, no fees.
Recorded incidents
Street-level crime from all 43 England & Wales forces. Polygon-queried per route; weighted by severity from violent crime down to public order.
Streetlight network
Tight-corridor query for street_lamp nodes within 150m of the route. Lit sections raise the score; dark gaps lower it.
Walking geometry
Foot-profile routing on OpenStreetMap's footway network. Returns the polyline that gets scored point-by-point.
Native to the surface
it lives on.
SafeWalk borrows the typography, elevation and colour primitives of Material Design — so the overlay reads as a feature of the map, not a plug-in stuck on top.
Design principles
Today's PoC is
tomorrow's mobile layer.
The Chrome extension proved the concept on the desktop surface — but walking happens on a phone. The next two stages move SafeWalk to where users actually need it.
Browser extension PoC
Live overlay on Google Maps in Chrome. 9 iterations. Proves scoring, projection, and Material-native UI on real Sheffield data.
Standalone mobile app
Native iOS/Android. SDK-level coordinate projection retires the desktop projection hack. Time-of-day weighting and crowdsourced incident pins ship here.
Integrated map layer
Partnered with a major navigation service — safety as a toggle next to Traffic and Transit. Reach: the people already using the map, not a download away.