About SafeWalkr
A free tool that finds the safest walking route to every Fairfax County public school, and the county data, imagery and measurement behind it.
What is SafeWalkr?
SafeWalkr is a free tool that finds the safest walking route to school for families across Fairfax County. Enter a home and pick an FCPS school, elementary, middle or high, and SafeWalkr returns the route that best avoids busy roads and missing sidewalks, not just the shortest one.
It covers all 188 FCPS attendance zones (138 elementary, 26 middle, 24 high), plus 14 hand-curated walk zones with more detailed local data. Directions are available in English and Spanish, at a school-age walking pace, and every route can be printed and sent home in a backpack for a family without a reliable smartphone.
Who builds SafeWalkr?
SafeWalkr is built by Isaac Leetyn, Ashwath Muppa and Danya Prokofev, an independent local project based in Fairfax County. There is no company, funding round, or staff behind it — a small team routing every attendance zone and reading the county's own data the way a parent would before trusting it.
The project exists because walk-zone eligibility is decided at the boundary level, while safety is decided street by street, and no general mapping app optimizes a route for a child on foot. Questions, corrections, or a street SafeWalkr should look at first: info@safewalkr.com.
How does SafeWalkr decide a route is safe?
SafeWalkr prices every street a walk could use and finds the cheapest path to school. A sidewalk costs less than a road without one, a busy road costs more than a quiet one, and a guarded crossing costs less than an unguarded one. The result usually isn't the shortest route, only the safest one the data supports.
Sidewalks are preferred, high-traffic roads are avoided, and street crossings are minimized, all on by default. Where a walk must cross a busy road anyway, the routing engine is pulled toward a staffed FCPS crossing-guard post if one exists nearby; a guard can make a necessary crossing cheaper, but never makes crossing more attractive than not crossing at all.
What data goes into a route?
Every route draws on five public sources: the county's sidewalk inventory, 2024 traffic counts, FCPS crossing-guard posts and attendance boundaries, OpenStreetMap's pedestrian network, and Street View imagery read by a vision model where the other sources are missing or wrong.
- Sidewalk inventory. 64,877 segments from Fairfax County's own walkway maintenance data, marking which stretches of street have a sidewalk today.
- Traffic counts. 26,489 road segments carrying the county's 2024 average-daily-traffic release (counts collected 1986–2024). Road class prices the rest of the network.
- FCPS data. Official SY2026–27 attendance boundaries for all 188 schools, and geocoded FCPS crossing-guard posts with their duty hours.
- OpenStreetMap. The pedestrian network itself, hundreds of thousands of ways contributed by OpenStreetMap volunteers, that the county data attributes are laid onto.
- Street View, read by a vision model. Where the county and OpenStreetMap disagree or say nothing, a vision model reads Street View panoramas at street junctions and returns sidewalk presence, road character and a walkability risk score. Coverage is partial and grows zone by zone; a route that used a verified panorama shows the Street View date it relied on.
What did measuring 9,731 walks show?
We routed every one of the 9,731 homes in SafeWalkr's 14 walk zones twice: once for the shortest path, once for the safest. For two homes in three, those two routes are different streets. The safest walk typically takes about 25 seconds longer, and it cuts walking in the roadway of a busy road by 86%.
The full measurement, zone by zone, is in the blog: Walking to school, by the numbers and The price of the safest walk.
Is SafeWalkr affiliated with FCPS or Fairfax County?
No. SafeWalkr is an independent project built on public Fairfax County and FCPS data. It is not published, endorsed, contracted, or operated by Fairfax County Public Schools or Fairfax County government, and no formal relationship with either has been established.
What are SafeWalkr's limitations?
A SafeWalkr route is planning guidance, not a safety guarantee: an adult should walk the route with a child before trusting it for a first solo walk. The underlying data has known gaps, and conditions on the ground change faster than any dataset can be rebuilt.
- County sidewalk records can be outdated, and some stretches carry no traffic count at all; the routing engine has to infer a price for those from road class alone.
- Street View verification currently covers part of the county, not the whole network, so most routes still rely on county and OpenStreetMap data without an eye-level check.
- OpenStreetMap is community-maintained and can be incomplete or briefly wrong after real-world construction, closures, or new development.
- A route reflects the data at the time it was built, not necessarily the street as it looks today.