User-centered analysis of a safe bus routing strategy

Abstract

Context-aware mobility has the potential to make the way we travel more efficient, safer, and more sustainable. Among the possible contexts, safety, in terms of crime levels in city regions, is one that has been used to calculate safer routes. Making a bus route safer is important to improve the quality of life of the passengers, who often are victims of criminals during their journey. However, existing studies focus only on private vehicles and do not assess the impact for citizens as a whole. In this work, an existing solution for calculating safe routes is evaluated in the context of public bus transport in terms of the impact caused to passengers. The results showed that, in general, changing a bus route to make it safer increases the distance traveled by a few kilometers for most passengers. This small increase in distance is not harmful to the passengers, given that they will be at less risk to face any kind of criminal situation. In addition to this analysis, a scalable tool for extracting mobility flow was also developed.