In an effort to fight back against the Man (who even now sleeps soundly in the next room), I’ve been using Trapster on my iPhone for a while. I’ve been motivated for my own reasons to do so, but I enjoyed some sympathetic reinforcement from today’s Wall Street Journal, which reports:
Suppliers estimate that there are now slightly over 3,000 red-light and speed cameras in operation in the U.S., up from about 2,500 a year ago. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that at the end of last year, 345 U.S. jurisdictions were using red-light cameras, up from 243 in 2007 and 155 in 2006. The cameras are operated by for-profit companies that typically make around $5,000 per camera each month.
A study in last month’s Journal of Law and Economics concluded that, as many motorists have long suspected, “governments use traffic tickets as a means of generating revenue.” The authors, Thomas Garrett of the St. Louis Fed and Gary Wagner of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, studied 14 years of traffic-ticket data from 96 counties in North Carolina. They found that when local-government revenue declines, police issue more tickets in the following year.
Well, duh.
Trapster is an application for iPhones and other PDAs that permits us to identify, mark, and track the location of speed cameras, red-light cameras, and police lurking locations. Tapster requires registration but it’s free, uses a clever interface, and makes updating locations a snap. The application also permits uploading photos of selected sites on a dynamic map that moves with your travel and provides alarms when you approach monitored locations.
The downsides: it uses a lot of power - You really need to be connected to a car charger - and application navigation can be complex, particularly while driving. Nevertheless, it makes me feel like I’m striking a blow for freedom every time I fire it up.
