SafeRoute — Route Around High-Crime Areas

Start

Destination

Passing through on the interstate is OK On: staying on a motorway/trunk road through a flagged area is allowed; leaving it onto surface streets is not. Off: any part of a flagged area counts, highway included.

Routing engine: checking…

Also avoid

Toll roads Freeways Ferries Unpaved

Timing

Plan by

Date & time

Buffer%

G Open in Google MapsFollows the selected route via waypoints W Open in WazeDestination only — Waze links can't carry waypoints

Flagged areas

● high ● elevated ● moderate (off by default) ● live data

Data sources & how areas are defined

Neighbourhood polygons — for the Chicago/NW-Indiana corridor, areas are drawn at neighbourhood scale (Gary Midtown, Tolleston, Glen Park, Downtown Hammond, Indiana Harbor …) rather than whole city limits, so a whole city is never written off. These outlines are approximate and hand-placed from published neighbourhood-level crime reporting — edit or delete any of them.

Live incident data — Chicago publishes incident-level crime with coordinates. When a trip touches Chicago the app pulls recent violent-crime points and marks only the grid cells that actually cluster. That's real block-level data, not an estimate. No equivalent open feed exists for Gary or Hammond.

Road classes — motorway/trunk geometry comes from OpenStreetMap so the app can tell an interstate pass-through from surface-street routing.

City-level circles — the national top-10 entries are still coarse radius markers from FBI-based rankings; they exist as a backstop for trips outside the detailed corridor.

Optional: OpenRouteService key

Avoidance works with no key. A free ORS key adds exact in-engine avoidance, but its limits are tight (zones ≤200 km²/20 km, trips ≤150 km).

Crime data is historical and incomplete; areas vary street to street and change over time. This is a personal planning aid, not a safety guarantee, and not a judgement about the people who live anywhere. Always use your own judgement about a route before driving it.