Walking directions should understand what walking actually feels like.

Safe Walk was built by Seyedborna Boyafraz as a TKS Moonshot project. The goal is simple: make pedestrian safety a first-class routing parameter, not an afterthought hidden behind shortest-path logic.

Founder note

Most navigation products were invented for cars. Pedestrian routing was added later, but the underlying goal stayed the same: reduce travel time.

That misses the reality of walking. A route can be technically faster while being poorly lit, isolated, or routed through an area with a higher incident pattern at night.

Safe Walk exists so safety context can be visible before someone has to choose a path from instinct.

The first version focuses on Toronto because the city has rich open data: police incident records, streetlight locations, road context, and transit geography. The bigger vision is a safety API that can sit underneath any urban mobility product.

Operating principles

Calm, precise, trustworthy.

Pedestrian-first navigation

Drivers optimize for speed. Walkers also care about lighting, exposure, street context, and whether a path feels reasonable after dark.

Safety as infrastructure

Safe Walk is designed as an API layer that cities, campuses, transit agencies, and apps can use without replacing their maps.

Community signal

Reports from people on the ground capture concerns that never become official data, then decay over time so the map stays current.