Country of Residence
United States
Age
17
Project title
Walk Home LA
Project Summary: Describe your project in one sentence
Walk Home LA is a free route planner that shows Los Angeles students the safer way to walk or ride home from school, built from five years of LAPD crime reports, city streetlights and Metro stops, for 668 LA schools, in English and Spanish.
Website URL(s) or social media handles.
https://safe-routes-la.github.io ; code: https://github.com/safe-routes-la/safe-routes-la.github.io
Project Category
My project is an existing project that I started
Project Stage
Pilot-Stage (We’ve tried an activity or two)
Founding Story: What was the spark that led you to start your project? What was the "Aha!" moment that led you to get started and see the potential for this to succeed?
Walk Home LA started after my teammate Michael was robbed while waiting for a bus in East LA. Afterward, we looked at how the map apps we use every day choose routes, and realized every one of them just finds the fastest way from point A to point B. None of them takes safety into account. When we looked at LAPD's public data, we found that what happened to Michael wasn't bad luck. From 2020 to 2024, 1,026 kids aged 10 to 18 were robbed on LA streets during school commute hours, 56% of all robberies of kids that age in the city. That's when we saw this could work. The information was already public: crime reports, streetlights, every Metro stop. Nobody had turned it into directions a student could actually follow. If a map app can route around traffic, it can route around the blocks where students get robbed.
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve? Why does it matter to you and your community?
Lots of LA students walk or take the bus to school, and for many there's no one free to drive them at 3 pm. The walk home is also when kids are most at risk: from 2020 to 2024, 1,026 children aged 10 to 18 were robbed on LA streets during school commute hours, 56% of all 1,838 robberies of kids that age in the city. Every map app sends students the shortest way home, even when it runs past the blocks with the most reported robberies. The data to do better already exists: LAPD publishes incident reports, the city maps its streetlights, and Metro publishes every stop. But none of it reaches a student or parent in a form they can use before they leave school. This matters to us because these are our classmates' walks. When families don't know which route is safer, kids either walk anxious on whatever route their phone picks, or their parents stop letting them walk at all.
Your Solution: How are you solving this problem? Share your specific solution.
Walk Home LA is a free website that plans the safer way home, live at safe-routes-la.github.io. 1. A student or parent picks their school and enters a home address or nearest cross streets. 2. It plans three options (the shortest route plus safer ones), walking only or with a bus or train, and shows how each scores at that time of day. 3. They can print a walking card listing the route's streets in order. Once the page loads, it keeps working without a connection. Behind it, we split LA's streets into 431,599 blocks and scored each one using 85,634 violent-crime reports from LAPD (2020 to 2024). We keep only violent offenses in public space, weight them by severity and how recent they are, and count crimes against children three times. Lighting from the city's 128,534 streetlights can lower a block's score by up to 35%, but a well-lit block in a dangerous area never looks calm. Waiting at one of 5,395 Metro stops counts as exposure; riding doesn't. It's built for schools: it covers 668 LA schools, each school gets a report on every way to get there, staff can paste a short snippet onto the school website, and it works in Spanish.
Impact: How has your project created impact / made a difference so far? Or, if at an early stage, what will impact look like?
So far, we've built and launched a working tool that anyone can use for free: 668 LA schools covered and 431,599 street blocks scored, in English and Spanish. Walk Home LA placed third in the Young Coders' Sphere Code for Transportation challenge in August 2026, and the code is open source so others can check our method and reuse it. We don't have usage numbers yet, and we'd rather say that than guess. Our next step is to measure real impact in schools. Over the next year, impact will look like this: two or three LAUSD schools putting the school report and printed walking cards in their front office and linking the planner on their website, and students and parents surveyed before and after on how safe they feel walking home and how often they walk. We think it will work because it answers a question families already ask, costs schools nothing, and turns public data into something a 14-year-old can follow on the way home.
Your Innovation: What is different about your project compared to other programs or solutions already out there? How is your project new or innovative?
Map apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps pick routes by time and traffic. Crime maps show where incidents happened, but they don't plan a route. Walk Home LA combines the two: it uses public safety data to plan an actual walk a student can take. What's new in how we do it: - It's built from what happens to kids. Crimes against children count three times, and we keep only violent offenses in public space, so a block isn't penalized for things that don't threaten someone walking by. - Time of day matters. The same street scores differently in the morning, afternoon and evening. - Lighting helps, but only so much. Streetlights can lower a block's score by up to 35%, so a well-lit block in a dangerous area never looks safe. - Transit is part of the trip. Waiting at a stop counts as exposure; riding doesn't. - It's made for schools, not just phones: a report for each school, printable walking cards, a snippet for school websites, and a Spanish version. We're also honest about limits. Reported crime isn't all crime, and LAPD's data ends in December 2024 because the department changed records systems. The tool says so on the page, and we explain every scoring choice publicly.
How many people are on your team?
2
Your team: What role(s) do your team members play? How do you share leadership with them?
We're two LA high school students, Adrian Erlikhman and Michael Tarekegn. The project started with Michael's experience, and we decide together what to build and where to take it next. I lead the code and the data pipeline. Next, we want students at other LA high schools to test routes on their own commutes and flag blocks that feel unsafe.
What’s Next: What are the next steps you plan to take to grow or strengthen your project over the next year? If your project is still in the idea stage, describe the steps you will take over the next three months to launch or begin developing it.
Over the next year: 1. Pilot with two or three LAUSD schools: put the school report and printed walking cards in the front office, add the planner to the school website, and survey students and parents before and after. 2. Update the data each year as LAPD releases new reports, so the scores stay current. 3. Add a way for students to flag blocks that feel unsafe even when the data looks fine, so the map reflects what students actually experience. 4. Bring it to another city. Our pipeline can run on another city's crime and streetlight data with a configuration change. Prize money would go to printing walking cards and running the school pilot surveys.
How do you encourage other people to join your project or learn about the problem you’re working on? If you have a new idea, tell us how you will do this in the future.
Our first move is making the problem visible. The site shows a number most families don't know: more than half of robberies of LA kids aged 10 to 18 happen during commute hours, and explains exactly how every block is scored, so anyone can question our choices. The code is open source, so other students and cities can check our method, suggest fixes or run it on their own data. Next, we want students to shape the map, not just use it. We plan to ask students at LA high schools to test routes on their own commutes and flag blocks that feel unsafe but don't show up in the data, and to work with school front offices to hand out walking cards to families. We haven't measured how many people we've engaged yet. Counting that is part of the school pilot.
