Honduras Bus Route Mapping

Honduras has one of the highest murder rates in the world. My office at the US Agency for International Development had an anti-violence program working in a few of the cities with the highest rates, such as Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The bus system is very popular in Tegucigalpa, with something like 2/3rd to 3/4ths of people taking the bus every day but no one had a good idea of where or which routes were most affected by crime. There also wasn't a publically accessible bus route map, as the system was operated by various contractors and small firms.

In Tegucigalpa, I helped organize a project with a local university to map the bus routes: I trained students how to use GPS units and they rode their usual routes. We collected and cleaned that data to create a bus map, and then compared that data with crime and violence data to predict which routes might be the most dangerous. The office then stated a pilot program, installing cameras and GPS units on the buses so the police could respond to crime quickly. The pilot worked well and the national government later rolled it out to the entire bus system in the city.

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