Speed Trap Social Network, Trapster

Blind_Io

Blind_Io

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http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/05/30/speed.traps/index.html

Well, it was bound to happen. The high-tech arms race has escalated once again. No, we're not talking about military weaponry.
We're talking about the tech-driven cat-and-mouse game between law-enforcement agencies and motorists when it comes to setting and avoiding speed traps.
It all started, of course, with the radar guns used by police officers to detect speeders. Then came radar detectors used by motorists who wanted to skedaddle faster than posted speed limits.
Then police began using laser units which are more effective and more accurate than radar guns and so on and so on.
Now, the latest "upgrade" in this ongoing game of high-tech one-upmanship: Trapster. Trapster is a service developed and run by Pete Tenereillo of Carlsbad, California, and is essentially a cell-phone social network that allows motorists to hook up with one another for the purpose of issuing real-time alerts about the location of speed traps.
Trapster works like this: Go to the Web site, and sign up for a free membership. Then download the Trapster software to your cell phone or PDA. Tenereillo said that most current-generation cell phones, Blackberries and other PDA's can accommodate the Trapster software.
Then, you're ready to hit the road. And once you're tooling down the highway, if you spot a state trooper or city cop lying in wait with a radar gun or laser unit, you just need to punch in "pound one" on your cell phone -- or dial a toll-free number. Other users are then alerted on their cell phones or PDA when they approach the same speed trap.
"One great thing about that is that it's hands-free," says Tenereillo. "You don't have to be looking at the phone or even be holding it to be notified of the speed trap -- which, of course, is safer, because you don't have to take your eyes off the road to be notified of the trap."
The more sophisticated cell phones/PDAs can also display a map that displays the exact location of the speed trap. "But obviously, people should pull over if they're going to look at the map," Tenereillo added.
Trapster was launched in April, and while Tenereillo declined to comment on the exact number of subscribers, he did say the site is booming. "We're going crazy, we've had so many people sign up that it's been hard to keep up with," he said. "We initially had some capacity issues as a result, so we had to re-do some of the architecture."
Tenereillo said one thing that surprised him is that "about half of our initial subscribers were soccer moms. But, when you think about it, that makes sense, they're in the car the most, and they take a lot of short trips, driving their kids to and from school, soccer practice, music lessons, etcetera -- so they're the ones getting the worst tickets, like for driving 53 [mph] in a 35 [mph] zone. Those are worse tickets than the ones you get out on the highway because judges show no mercy when it comes to speeding in residential neighborhoods or adjacent surface streets."
In May, Trapster also became integrated with Dash Navigation Inc., an Internet-connected GPS device for vehicles that can be mounted on the dashboard. Trapster relies partly on the WiFi technology provided Skyhook Wireless Inc., a Boston-based firm that provides positioning services that depend on various WiFi access points. It also relies in part on satellite-based Global Positioning Systems.
"The reason that Skyhook is a great partner for us is that, if you have a handset that only has GPS, that takes a few minutes after you turn it on before it gets a fix on the location of a speed trap," says Tenereillo. "But Skyhook's WiFi technology is instantaneous; it can tell you immediately if there is a cop with a radar gun in your vicinity."
"Pete needed to get Trapster into as many handsets as possible, as many different types of phones and PDAs as he could, in order to build a large interactive social network," Ted Morgan, Skybook's CEO, explained. "A big challenge for a service like Trapster is that it requires the phone to know its own location. So, by integrating our technology, it enabled Trapster to expand the potential pool of phones they could get service onto.
"We take advantage of the fact that there are WiFi access points almost everywhere in populated areas -- homes, offices, Starbucks stores, etc," Morgan said. "We have crews that go out and survey every street, we've covered over a million miles of road, which covers 70 percent of the population. We've now mapped over 40 million access points."
As mentioned, Trapster also relies in part on satellite-based GPS, but using GPS alone is not enough to ensure "total coverage" for a system like Trapster, Morgan said.
"Our WiFi system works in a way that is similar to GPS, except that, instead of using satellites, we use the WiFi signals that permeate through most populated areas. GPS has some limitations, in that the cell phone manufacturer has to add it to the phone, and GPS also does not work as well in crowded urban areas."
Tenereillo expanded, saying, "What's also great about Trapster is that it can work with handsets that have GPS, or, it can work with handsets that don't have GPS, because of the WiFi technology provided by Skyhook."
One would think that law enforcement would take a dim view of a company/service like Trapster -- since you could look at it as a service that is enabling speeders to escape detection. But both Tenereillo and Morgan point out that the opposite is true.
"We have a quote on our Web site from the National Association of Police Organizations that states a service like Trapster is actually a positive," says Tenereillo. "Because, if one driver warns everyone else that there is a speed trap at a certain location, then everyone slows down -- which, after all, is the whole purpose of a speed trap, getting drivers to slow down."
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The website is HERE.
 
Less tickets=higher taxes

The money has to come from somewhere.
 
Ahh, but according to the police and politicians tickets are about enforcement, not generating revenue.
 
Blind_Io said:
Ahh, but according to the police and politicians tickets are about enforcement, not generating revenue.
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Yes.........lol.:lol:
 
jetsetter said:
Less tickets=higher taxes

The money has to come from somewhere.
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I'd rather pay higher taxes every year in an orderly manner than encounter those "unpleasant surprises" that lead me to higher insurance premiums and the interrogation of power-happy cops. :rolleyes:

Though the last ticket I got was from an incredibly nice officer, an old guy who clearly didn't feel like I needed it (82 in a 65 on a flat stretch of highway, perfect visibility, no traffic, at noon) and demonstrated this by instructing me for 5 minutes on how to fight the ticket. "Well, you just check Not Guilty here on this and show up on the court at this date, and if you want to prove that you were in the clear you can go right ahead. They'll probably knock it down to a traffic violation like, hell, parked in a loading zone, and you won't have to pay anything."


I could read him instantly. Here was clearly an experienced veteran of the New York State Police, a dedicated member of an illustrious group of public servants, sworn to protect and serve the common man against the injustices of wicked men. Yet he was forced to spend his lunch in the middle of nowhere, staring into the LCD of a radar gun for the mere sake of revenue generation. And it was pretty blatant too, on a cloudless noon day at a place that could have handled a steady flow of traffic at its typical 80 miles per hour. Nobody was drunk, nobody was swerving in and our, rush hour didn't strike this stretch of rolling farmland, there were no accidents, it wasn't raining, snowing, hailing, or even cloudy, and one could see for miles and miles and miles.


So what was he doing there? Fighting the system from the inside. By telling me how to subvert the system he was trapped in, he seemed as if he was sympathizing with my plight and urgency to get home to MA, as I told him. Alas, it was a job he had to do, and I provided the break from monotony he desperately needed. Who knew how long he had been out there for. After all...he had a job to do, no matter how demeaning he may have thought it was.


I asked him jokingly, "you know, you could just give me a warning instead and save the trouble." He laughed and replied, "sorry, sir, I can't give out warnings."

:cry: It was worth a shot anyway.

Anyway, that's my long-winded story. Oh, and I'm a member of Trapster, but I should probably get around to figuring it out first.
 
^

You may have run into the only decent state trooper in all of New York. Almost everyone I know who has driven through New York with out of state plates has been pulled over at least once. I was lucky in that when I was driving back and forth between VA and CT once or twice a month I always went through New York at 3:00 AM and there were never any cops on I-84 at that time of night. I think they might have pulled me over for doing 90-100 mph.
 
*Waits for Lars Ulrik to bitch about this*
 
jayhawk said:
I would say that the average American, if you combine and average local, state and federal taxes, pays 20-25% of their income in taxes.
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In Connecticut, making just over $30k a year I get about 24% taken out in federal income tax, and a bit more for state, then we have a 6% sales tax(not sure where that falls relative to the national average), and gas is $4.20ish.

But more on topic, a speeding ticket for doing 84 in a 65 is over $250, so I might sign up for this site, but it would be better if I could just get myself to drive a bit more slowly.
 
^You need deduction my man.

I am a couple of tax brackets ahead of you but my effective federal tax rate in 2006 was about 10 percent and my 2007 effective federal rate was even a little less then that.
 
1040EZ/TurboTax for me, I can't be bothered to figure out my deductions. This past April I actually paid extra to have someone at TurboTax look at my return to see if I had missed something, and I had mentioned how I'm surprised that I get so little back, but they said it was all ok. Iunno, I guess I should just start building axles and not worry about money.
 
smib said:
1040EZ/TurboTax for me, I can't be bothered to figure out my deductions. This past April I actually paid extra to have someone at TurboTax look at my return to see if I had missed something, and I had mentioned how I'm surprised that I get so little back, but they said it was all ok. Iunno, I guess I should just start building axles and not worry about money.
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I use turbotax too but I itemize because I have a house. If you don't have a house then you probably just need to take the standard deduction because you don't have enough items.

I deduct my mortgage interest, student loan interest, property taxes, IRA contributions, HSA contributions, health insurance premiums and probably a few things I am forgetting.
 
Yeah, I don't have any of that. I always just get the standard deduction. I wonder If I put something stupid down as my filing status on my W-2, I should check that out.
 
smib said:
Yeah, I don't have any of that. I always just get the standard deduction. I wonder If I put something stupid down as my filing status on my W-2, I should check that out.
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Yeah check that and ask your HR guy to send you the W-2 worksheet so you can calculate out what your filing status should be. If they have a 401k where you work you should sign up for that just for the company match and the savers credit. Depending on how much money you put into the 401k you can get a decent sized deduction at the end of the year called the savers credit.
 
We have 401k with 5% matching as well as a 2% pension thingy, so I have 12% of my gross income into tax-deferred savings while only actually paying for 5%. I imagine I should just file as a 0, because I would rather have more taken out throughout the year then have to pay out in April like I did this year.
 
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