Making Rides Safer: Uber Partners With SafetiPin, A Map Based Mobile Safety App

On its mission to creating a comprehensive safety ecosystem for riders in the country, Uber is has announced that it is joining hands with a map-based mobile safety app called SafetiPin.

The app tags safety scores to locations on a map in a city, based on safety audits done across the city. Starting with Delhi, this new feature will be rolled out across other global markets in the coming months, including Bogotá, Colombia and Nairobi, Kenya with the aim to cover approximately 20,000 km of city roads and areas.

How It Works?

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. This information is then 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 the collaboration means?

Uber will advance the contribution to SafetiPin’s data collection efforts across the city by providing access to partner-drivers and their cars, these partner-drivers will be trained and will work at night with SafetiPin’s safety auditors.

This will include following aspects:

• 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.

Post the case, where a Uber driver was accused for raping a women, in December last year, Uber has come up with a number of initiatives to make sure passenger safety in the city and all around. Earlier this month, Uber had partnered with First Advantage for driver screening.

Another taxi aggregator Ola in January said that it is investing more than $20 Mn in passenger safety related efforts and has tied up with background verification agency Authbridge to vet its driver partners.