- Safe as houses (Image: Eamonn McCabe/Camera Press)
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StreetScore, developed by Nikhil Naik at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his team, is built on crowdsourced data. It uses a web survey called Place Pulse, which asks people to choose which looks safest out of two images of Boston or New York taken from Google Streetview. Once each image has been scored by humans, an algorithm spots features that correlate with high safety scores, allowing it to look for those features in other streetscapes. It can then create a map of the city, colour-coded by perceived safety. The team is also applying the software to Chicago and Detroit.
"We have found that things like highways, big infrastructure projects and waterfronts tend to create regions that are perceived to be unsafe. They isolate neighbourhoods," says Naik.
The team is now inviting people to rank images of cities around the world based on their perceived liveliness, beauty and wealth, as well as safety. There are already apartment-finding tools that rank addresses based on their surroundings, like WalkScore, and the team envisions similar tools that use StreetScore.
James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago imagines other possibilities: "You could plug [StreetScore] into Google Maps and push the button that says 'Give me the scenic route', which would be cool." But the value is in how these criteria interact with political boundaries, policing routes and traffic, he says. He thinks StreetScore could be adapted to provide an objective measure of inequality between city or state districts.
Most of our measures of inequality rely on data collected by organisations like the International Monetary Fund, says César Hidalgo of the MIT Media Lab, who works on StreetScore. "You don't need to read a report from the IMF to see that Rio De Janeiro is unequal, you can see it from the taxi window," he says.
"This is really going to shed some light on inequality, light that could be used intelligently," says Evans.
You can try Place Pulse at pulse.media.mit.edu.
This article appeared in print under the headline "City safety maps made by spot the difference"