Even as its application for licence to operate in Delhi is yet to get a nod from the Transport department, international cab service-provider Uber, on Monday, announced its pilot project with Safetipin to conduct a safety audit of the city over five months. Safetipin is a map-based mobile safety app that tags safety scores to locations on a city’s map. The project, which will begin on February 25 in Delhi, will soon be rolled out by Uber in other cities including Bogota, Colombia and Nairobi. The company said it is aiming at covering approximately 20,000 km of city roads and areas. The free mobile App will collect night-time data of city areas using camera phones mounted on the vehicles hired by Uber customers, to capture surrounding roads and city conditions automatically at regular intervals via photographs. [related-post] The photographs will be tagged with a precise safety score based on nine parameters — lighting, openness, visibility, security, walk path, crowd and gender diversity and density of the location. The company said the information of safety analysis will be shared with passengers when the project concludes. Explaining how the Safetipin app will function, a company spokesperson said, “Safetipin will collect data of locations based on nine parameters, that together contribute to the perception of safety, by measuring actual location conditions to generate a safety score for an area. The information is supplemented with comments and photographs from real users and trained safety auditors. The data collected will also be shared with city governments for urban planning and safety campaigns for safer travel around the city.” While the Delhi government had banned operations of all but six cab-booking services including Uber after a woman was allegedly raped by an Uber driver last December, Uber has applied for a licence under the modified radio taxi scheme. The Transport department had, on February 18, issued an ultimatum to Uber and another cab service-provider for not removing the deficiencies in their applications that the department had earlier pointed out. Uber had been asked to remove the deficiencies by February 25. “If they don’t remove the deficiencies in their applications, we will reject it. If they are found to be operating despite the ban, Traffic police and transport enforcement staff will check the violations and impound the vehicles, if necessary,” a Transport department official said. Forensics prove rape: victim’s lawyer The prosecution in the Uber trial, in its final arguments on Monday, said that scientific evidence corroborates the oral testimony of the woman, proving the charge of rape against accused Shiv Kumar Yadav. “The woman’s oral testimony regarding her injuries corroborates with medical evidence. The forensic expert has also said in his testimony that on examining the forensic samples of the accused and the woman, it was found that the driver had tried to commit unnatural sex with her,” special public prosecutor Atul Shrivastava told judge Kaveri Baweja. He argued that the doctors who had examined the victim after the incident also testified that she was raped and there was an attempt to strangulate her. The court has fixed Tuesday for hearing final arguments from the defence.
