  Over two thirds of women of all ages in the UK have experienced some form of
sexual harassment in a public space. Recent tragic incidents involving female
pedestrians have highlighted some of the personal safety issues that women
still face in cities today. There exist many popular location-based safety
applications as a result of this; however, these applications tend to take a
reactive approach where action is taken only after an incident has occurred.
This paper proposes a preventative approach to the problem by creating safer
public environments through societal incentivisation. The proposed system,
called "Herd Routes", improves the safety of female pedestrians by generating
busier pedestrian routes as a result of route incentivisation. A novel
application of distributed ledgers is proposed to provide security and trust, a
record of system users' locations and IDs, and a platform for token exchange. A
proof-of-concept was developed using the simulation package SUMO (Simulation of
Urban Mobility), and a smartphone app. was built in Android Studio so that
pedestrian Hardware-in-the-Loop testing could be carried out to validate the
technical feasibility and desirability of the system. With positive results
from the initial testing of the proof-of-concept, further development could
significantly contribute towards creating safer pedestrian routes through
cities, and tackle the societal change that is required to improve female
pedestrian safety in the long term.
