Ben Trigg has updated his popular interactive crime map of Wilmington

Back in January, D.C.-based dev Ben Trigg wanted to know if an interactive crime map of Wilmington that he’d cobbled together was of any interest to Wilmingtonians.
The purpose of the map is not to simply look at places where crime occur, but to find the safest travel routes at specific times.
Given that the story about it was our eighth most popular story of all time, it’s safe to say that yes, the good people of Wilmington are indeed interested in such a thing.
The interest was so high that Open Data Wilmington invited Trigg to speak at one of their events in February to talk about data and mapping.

Trigg has been fine-tuning the map since then, and he now has a final (or close to final) product with several new updates:

• Prompts with user instructions upon loading the site
• Shows a “heatmap” which looks at crime at all times of the day, and if a certain amount of crime happens close to an area, it is colored orange (preventing the user from going through crime hotspots, even if there haven’t been any shootings during that time of the day)
• The heatmap and the amount of crime data to display can be customized
• It is usable on a mobile phone: controls are moved so that they are visible on all screen sizes
• Users can choose driving directions instead of only walking routes
• Users can send their route to Google Maps, which either opens an official Google Maps page, or a Google Maps app
• Auto-routing can be turned off if the user wants to do it themselves, or if the auto-routing does a poor job

“I think it’s a lot more useable now,” Trigg said in an email.
Use the map