A must-have iPhone application for people who drive a lot is Trapster – the app for avoiding speed traps. Or a better description by Paul Carr before he was fired from The Guardian: “Yes, that’s Trapster: the mobile distraction for when driving at high speed isn’t fucking dangerous enough.”
But anyway, Trapster is available on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile and Nokia/Symbian (I wouldn’t be surprised to see it for Palm in the near future, either). It’s had more than 1 million downloads, and is “getting about 50,000 downloads a day right now” to add to that.
Which just makes it all the more valuable. Trapster relies on users to report speed traps when they see them, making the road safe for other Trapster users who come later. The more users, the more data, and the safer the roads are for speeders.
It’s one of my personal favorites. And before anyone freaks out about how this encourages speeding, don’t. The site has endorsements from various police officers and organizations, such as “If someone slows down because of (Trapster), it’s accomplishing the same goal of trying to get people to obey the speed limit.” But Carr, in the link above, has a good point – the real danger is all the people grabbing their phone to add in a new speed trap. Jon Stewart says it best in the video below:
I should have used that when I was in LA..
totally beats blinking lights which is still huge in Ontario and Quebec
great app. reminds you to be alert and careful. can help families save money, heartache and hardship.
Probably better not to speed than to speed and hope your iPhone tells you when to slow down.
I want to hack their system and put false speed traps everywhere. There are too many douchebag drivers on the road.
Brilliant. They should sell a dash mount too.
This is only necessary if your car is slow enough that the cops can actually catch you.
Michael this made me laugh so damn hard! ^^
Yeah, cops would rather catch the guy who’s lagging behind you
In the UK if your caught with a device (or application) like this, you will get fined and I think points on your licence – which inturn could result in a driving ban!
good to see the UK police also taking a stance against iphones
Not true. TomTom the UKs biggest selling Sat Nav has this feature built in with updates on a monthly subscription.
I am working on an app that catches police radio waves.
what we need is an app that lets people report other people using trapster on their iphone and not paying attention to the road.
We have different opinion on it obviously.
Serg, I don’t mean to discourage you but it’s actually illegal to do what you want to do… I had a similar idea awhile back and found out that you can’t legally do that.
Are you an idiot? It’s not illegal to intercept radio waves unless they have scrambled or encrypted the data, and you make an effort to bypass that. Police scanners are NOT illegal, so long as they receive only.
The app is useless as cops have iPhones, too.
This is the same idea that I thought 1.5 years ago. Good to see it actually implemented.
Trapster is more than 1.5 years old.
There are plenty of red light cameras, speed “traps”, and mobile speed “traps” in my state. However, before you actually drive past the camera – you will see a warning sign 100 yards before it, and will have plenty of time to adjust your speed.
I congratulate the developers, but I suspect only the terribly paranoid will use it every morning. Still a good impulse buy, though.
destroying red light cameras and speed trap cameras is an acceptable form of civil disobedience.
I like it, wondering if it’s available in Taiwan.
What are “Dowloads”?
I would not risk using this in the UK, if the police see you touching a mobile phone while driving you’ll more than likely be getting 3 points on your license, it’s your word against the cops and they are not going to do you any favors, it happended to me last year for just checking the time on my phone, got 3 points
.
“it happended to me last year for just checking the time on my phone … ”
In America we have clocks in our car dashboards.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
“And before anyone freaks out about how this encourages speeding, don’t. The site has endorsements from various police officers and organizations, such as “If someone slows down because of (Trapster), it’s accomplishing the same goal of trying to get people to obey the speed limit.””
Slowing down in specific spots before doing what the hell you like whenever your phone says you can is not the same thing as obeying the speed limit.
The whole system of visible speed cameras is flawed, and obviously so. If you want speed limits to be respected, you merely have to hide the cameras.
Those who argue against this are the ones who want everyone else to drive at the speed limit, but also want to be able to cheat without getting caught – whether they’ve figured out that this is the case or not. Myself included.
Wasn’t this clip on the Daily Show the other day?
They were making fun of the same CNN because the same anchor reported on tougher laws against distracted SMSing drivers, and then showing this super complicated iPhone app and saying how people should use it while driving.
This app will be completely pointless because every law enforcement agency will just start reporting their own speed traps all over the place…THAT’S WHY THEY ENDORSE IT. A more useful application would be one that shows the most-ticketed spots in, say, the past three- to six-months…that can’t be faked, but would require a lot of work to pull together and keep updated.
I don’t speed, but love this app. Very elegant and I love contributing to the crowdsourced data. What’s most amazing to me is how many countries have comprehensively pushed data into this app – I counted on their live map a few months ago and came up with more than 50 countries with real data. That is crazy! And, the UK, legalities aside appears to be the one with the absolute best data – if you look in there, someone has gone through the trouble of appending a Google Streetview image of every single camera next to the reports…(gotta love the Brits!). Anyway, great app and nice to see them doing well!
i want to mount a camera in my car to catch all the things people do while driving (my personal favourite – eating a bowl of cereal!) / better than candid camera.
Stupid question: If I am a Blackberry users, do I see speed traps reported by iPhone users? In other words, it is 1 live database, right? Not Many?
Not a stupid question (I had the same). Answer: 1 database, multiple platforms/access points.
Wait until the police go black hat on this. They can create hundreds of accounts and add fake speed traps making this application useless.
Can the police go black hat? Shh don’t tell them.
As a police officer, I like to add speed traps to Trapster everywhere I drive. It keeps people honest.
Didn’t check the video, don’t want to from work, but shouldn’t the app just give you an audio warning (not sure if its already doing that) to slow down when coming near a camera.
Why should the driver be distracted? He/she shouldn’t need to look at the actual application UI.
Fire it up, and put it on the side, and just listen to it when it sounds a warning…
It’s getting 50,000 downloads a day because last Friday Fox News ran the story about Trapster all day long saying how cool it was. I tested it on a 2-hour road trip and unfortunately there were several false positive reports of speed traps along the way. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if your response is to slow down and obey the speed limit. However you could save yourself a great deal of worrying and hassle if you just set your cruise control.
Jon stewart piece is hilarious, but typical of this latest news in the spin cycle – phone use while driving is evil, it will lead to deaths, etc. There is plenty of legitimacy to that argument, but (to @Vaibhav) the thing is all audio alerts….same as a gps or, for that matter, a radio that’s been in the car for decades. Reporters are lazy. Also, reporting false positives, I suspect, is dealt with via an algorithim that says ‘user A has too few reports that have been previously reported, therefore, ban user A’…pretty simple crowdsourcing measure.
Used this on an Chicago to Orlando trip. Pretty useless. Data not conclusive, expedient, not relevant in context. On top of which you have to vote yes or no for each location you may have clicked on. This is not safe nor useful to a driver that is using this app for its intended purposes. You would need a passenger, one that gives a crap about speed trap in the first place.
No thanks, I stick with my V1
I find the app to be very distracting. It just makes me paranoid so I tend to think about how fast I’m driving and slow down.
I agree with Kevin- set your cruise control.
Why you shouldn’t use any apps while driving.. http://bit.ly/3y5QQs
What’s to keep cops and other “do gooders” from gaming Trapster by adding fake cameras wherever they want people to drive slower? Hell I might even report a fake camera on my residential street to maybe minimize the people who drive like 50 mph past kids playing on the sidewalk..
Photonboy, that is the best idea! They drive race cars up and down my street. I don’t think they are using Trapster though.