Boston Mayor Marty Walsh announced a new piece of his Vision Zero plan to end traffic-related fatalities and injuries today: an app-based contest to become the city’s safest driver.

With a few tongue-in-cheek nods to Bostonians’ reputation for bad driving, the competition is a kind of public relations campaign aimed at channeling the kind of aggressive competition found on Boston roadways into an incentive to drive more responsibly.

The project, called the “Boston Safest Driver Competition,” is the result of a collaboration between the Mayor’s Office of Urban Mechanics, which tries to foster partnerships between city government and the private tech sector and Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a Cambridge-based tech company that develops software aimed at promoting better driving behavior.

The competition is both a contest and an eponymous smartphone app, which records five measurements of behavior that can lead to accidents: rapid acceleration, harsh braking, sharp turns, speeding, and drivers fiddling with their phones.

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