Safe Routes

Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 years old worldwide. They are the third largest cause of death (nearly 38,000 people annually) in the United States and the tenth leading cause of death (approximately 1.35 million people per year) worldwide, which translates to 3,700 deaths on average per day worldwide. Furthermore, 4.4 million Americans are injured seriously enough to require medical attention, which results in $380 million in direct medical costs annually. Yet, given all of that, the various navigation software and GPS products used by motorists on a daily basis do not account for the safety of the routes they suggest and navigate users through. This paper is to report on Safe Routes, a navigation software under research and development at Santa Clara University's Ethical, Pragmatic, and Intelligent Computing (EPIC) Laboratory for the safety scoring of routes in an effort to help reduce the number of road traffic injuries and fatalities. Safe Routes operates on historical accident data as well as real time road and weather conditions for every road segment in all the potential routes between a user designated source and destination in order to calculate the safety rating of each and to rank them for the user with the hope of persuading the user to choose the safest route for navigation.