Uber Nairobi today in a statement announced a partnership with SafetiPin, a map-based mobile safety app that tags safety scores to locations on a map in a city, based on safety audits done across the city.
The Uber and SafetiPin collaboration was born in New Delhi, India and the pilot project rolled out there on the 25th February. It is expected in other global markets in the coming months, with the aim to cover approximately 20,000 km of city roads and areas.
According to Kaitlin Freedman, Operations Manager, Uber Nairobi in a statement, “Uber is committed to bringing the best in class safety to the streets of Nairobi. By working together with SafetiPin on this cross-border initiative we hope to provide local communities with the technologies to enable them to travel more safely around their cities”
SafetiPin works simply.
SafetiPin collects data of locations based on nine parameters that together contribute to the perception of safety by measuring actual location conditions in order to generate a safety score for an area. The information is supplemented with comments and photographs from real users and trained safety auditors. The data collected will also be shared with city governments for urban planning and safety campaigns for safer travels around the city.
What this means?
Uber will advance the contribution to SafetiPin’s data collection efforts across Nairobi by providing access to partner-drivers and their cars. These partner-drivers, based at different locations in the city, will be trained and work at night with SafetiPin’s safety auditors.
This project will see the two:
- Collect night-time data of extensive city areas using camera phones mounted on vehicles (exterior) to capture surrounding road/ city conditions automatically at regular intervals via photographs.
- Each photograph is tagged with a precise safety score based on nine predetermined parameters (lighting, openness, visibility, security, walk path, crowd and gender diversity and density)
- Working with the city government and planners to implement projects utilising this data to strengthen the safety conditions of any given area (for example, additional street lighting). This will also allow residents and visitors to ascertain at-risk areas.
- Over time, re-assess the areas where improvement projects had been carried out, to measure impact against the original safety score.
“SafetiPin is a free app that women and others can use to view their city from the perspective of safety. As part of our work in cities, we are delighted to have Uber’s participation and support in key cities around the world. This association will provide us with a much larger data set that would otherwise not have been possible, and the process is easier with Uber’s engaged and professional driver community” said Ashish Basu, Founder of SafetiPin.
