I had a couple of opportunities to road-trip across northern Nevada and California this month - once to Laguna Seca for the final race of the American Le Mans series and another from Reno to San Francisco. My wife & I put Trapster through a rigorous workout, with stationary traps loaded into the Uniden BCT15 scanner and her Blackberry monitoring stationary and live alerts. Here are some observations that I hope will be helpful to Trapster's development:
- The scanner produced far fewer false alerts than the Blackberry, being that each of the (non-live) trap types can be assigned its own alert radius. In particular, red light cams deserve no more than a few hundred feet whereas hiding places deserve a half-mile or more. I support others' requests for speed-based alerting, but a nice and simple half-step would be to simply allow a specific alert radii for each alert type.
- Roving speed enforcement is a problem. Trapster users are instructed to report stationary traps, but too many law enforcement vehicles (pacing or, more commonly, shooting radar) are moving. If everybody obeys Trapster's rules, certain dangerous corridors will not be mapped, being that there is no "usual hiding place." Likewise, any live data produced from traffic stops eventually expires. To resolve this, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to report roving vehicles as we do other live traps, perhaps with a special alert type. In many situations, such as witnessed on the SF Bay Bridge, cops are trolling the bridge, back and forth, in a circular pattern. Again, there is no hiding place, but it's a monster of a speed trap. One live alert here would do wonders. We actually had the good fortune to catch a motorcycle cop at two stops - one on the east side of the bridge and then, after pacing us, another in front of us, on the west side. End of the month, I guess.
- The "usual hiding place" alerts are fun at first, but I now see Trapster's strength in its live alerts (just add critical mass). Yes, confidence can reduce alerts, but it's only a filter. Does Trapster throw out the live data when it expires or do you hold on to it for data crunching? For example, Trapster should be able to grade the aforementioned "dangerous corridor" by factoring hiding place alerts, live alerts, confidence levels, and historical live alerts, their time of day and day of month. Add these together and Trapster has a "threat level," green-to-red, for any area.
This became apparent when comparing the scanner's operation to the Blackberry. The scanner can produce only one alert at a time, whereas the Blackberry displays multiple alerts on its screen. [If you monitor only the audible alerts, then you're similarly limited.] In the thousand+ miles of highway we tracked, only twice did my wife shout "Wow, there's five alerts here!" Both times, and only those two times, was a Trapster hiding place actually manned (or recently manned - having just snared some poor sap). Clearly, there is something to this - aggregating an area's alerts and producing an accordant warning. And, a one-time "you're entering a red zone" alert would be much safer than monitoring the screen for running threat count. - Trapster needs more active users! Dozens of live speed traps across a thousand miles of U.S. highway produced no live alerts! Not one! In fact, at this moment, there are fifteen live alerts in the entirety of America. Okay, Trapster is still in beta, b-b-but drivers of the world are anxious!!!
Forget one-off spots on CNN. Your loudest mouth piece is your existing membership. You need only empower us to spread the word. I have begun promoting Trapster to the local Porsche club and other car clubs - they are immediately intrigued (though far too many discover that they have incompatible phones) - but we really need to see truckers and cabs using it. Unlike your fellow car enthusiasts, truckers and cabs are on the road 24/7 and will blanket the country in a network of live alerts. Furthermore, they talk to each other by radio and will spread the word quickly. Meanwhile, for the rest of us car folk, if you'll produce a slick brochure in PDF format, we can download, print and share at local events. I will personally vow to print and place brochures in a few strategic, high-traffic truck stops. Hopefully, others can follow suit.
Again, I hope this is helpful. I apologize for being wordy, but some real-world feedback is typically valuable in any beta. Keep up the great work!
Dave
