SafeWalkr
Open the map

We read the street,
not the map.

SafeWalkr runs Google Street View imagery through a vision model to identify which routes have sidewalks, then assigns walkability scores. This is coupled with traffic and other data to discover the safest path.

Open a live route See how it reads a street
  • Sidewalk None
  • Road Suburban
  • Canopy Yes
  • Walkability 8/10
38.780527, −77.139905 One classified capture demonstrating safety metrics.

Four out of five blocks we have read
have no sidewalk at all.

This is not an estimate from a road database. It is what the model returned after looking at every capture, one at a time. The county's own sidewalk inventory covers what was built and recorded; the imagery covers what is actually there.

Sidewalk present, by road class 2,818 captures read

Main road 350 with a sidewalk, 473 without
Suburban street 194 with a sidewalk, 1,566 without
Other 15 with a sidewalk, 220 without

473 captures sat on a main road with no sidewalk: the condition a walking route should never send a child down, and the one a shortest-path engine cannot see.

How a street becomes a routing decision

  1. Capture

    A panorama is pulled at each node of the pedestrian network: every junction a child would actually stand at.

  2. Classify

    A vision model reads the frame and returns what it sees: sidewalk or none, the road's character, tree canopy, and a walkability score.

  3. Attribute

    The verdict is written onto the graph edge for that block, alongside the county sidewalk inventory and measured traffic volumes.

  4. Route

    Edge cost rises with traffic and falls where a sidewalk exists, so the shortest path and the safest path stop being the same answer.

What is running, and what is not

Check the map and build a route for yourself. The routing engine below is live right now and you can open it. The imagery layer beside it is still in development, and this is exactly what each one does today.

Live today

  • 188 school zones across Fairfax County: 138 elementary, 26 middle, 24 high. 175 have a surveyed school entrance; the remaining 13 route to the zone centroid until we match them.
  • 64,877 sidewalk segments from the county's walkway maintenance inventory
  • 339,289 pedestrian ways from OpenStreetMap
  • Measured traffic volumes weighting every edge, from the county count dataset (individual counts 1986–2024)
  • Turn-by-turn directions at a school-age walking pace, in English and Spanish
  • A printable route sheet for families without a phone in hand
Open the map and route a walk

In development

  • 2,818 panoramas classified end to end, every one returning a verdict
  • Sidewalk presence, road class, canopy, and a 0–10 walkability score per capture
  • Coverage today is a sample of the county, not the whole pedestrian network
  • Those verdicts are not yet written into the live routing graph

Closing that gap is what the next section is about.

The SafeWalkr map application. A route runs from 1853 Patton Terrace to Chesterbrook, drawn in dark red where the risk is highest. The sidebar reads 0.41 miles, 10 minutes, followed by five turn-by-turn steps, and a legend explains that route colour tracks missing sidewalks and traffic volume.
A real route out of the live engine: 1853 Patton Terrace to Chesterbrook, 0.41 miles, ten minutes at a child's pace. The line darkens toward red where the riskiest areas are: missing sidewalk, traffic, or both.

Improving safety for all Fairfax County students

A walk zone tells a family that their child is expected to walk. It does not tell them which streets to take, or which corner has no sidewalk on either side. SafeWalkr already routes every attendance zone in the county. What comes next is making each of those routes rest on what the imagery actually shows, block by block.

All 188 attendance zones are routable today every zone routed on imagery-verified sidewalks, not just the county inventory
2,818 blocks read so far the full county pedestrian network, re-read as roads and sidewalks change
A route a family can open and print a map of where the gaps are, so the county can see which crossings to fix first

Fairfax County already draws the walk zones. What nobody has, block by block, is a record of whether those zones are actually walkable. That is what this is for.

SafeWalkr

Isaac Leetyn · Ashwath Muppa · Danya Prokofev

info@safewalkr.com