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(Source: Thefuntheory.com via The High Definite)

This brilliant idea of American Kevin Richardson’s won the Fun Theory award competition run by Volkswagen (Sweden). The idea is to capture on camera who keep to the speed limit.  They would have their photos taken and their vehicle registration numbers recorded and entered into a lottery.  Winners would receive cash prizes and will be notified by post.  This is where it gets interesting.  The winning pot would come from the people who are caught speeding.  That changes the idea of whole idea of enforcement on its head and makes it more appealing to the community and encourages compliance through rewards for better behavior.

The Fun Theory is based on the idea that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior. Can we get more people to obey the speed limit by making it fun to do? This was the question Kevin’s idea answered and it was so good that Volkswagen, together with The Swedish National Society for Road Safety, actually made this innovative idea a reality in Stockholm, Sweden.

Click here to learn more about the competition and the other awesome entries. Mind blowing ideas!

Related articles

• Fun Theory Award winner rewards safe drivers with lottery tickets (makezine.com)
• Fun Theory Award winner rewards safe drivers with lottery tickets (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Speed cameras: how did the lottery turn out? (libdemvoice.org)
• The Fun Theory (cateof.wordpress.com)

(Source: New York Times)

Car-to-car communication is a dream of traffic researchers. Radar, video and other sensors in a car would understand the environment around it and communicate such information as sudden braking, rainfall and speed to the receptors in other cars, enabling other drivers to avoid accidents and congestion.

High-tech car-to-car communication is already here in France, but the object is avoiding fines of 90 euros ($140) or more for speeding. Several companies have introduced devices that will alert drivers to the presence of mobile radar units set up by the police. One such device is made by Coyote, a French company, which plans to bring its product to the United States early next year.

Coyote’s best-selling model is the Mini Coyote. It costs around $225, which includes three months of service. After that, there’s a monthly charge of $15.  Business Wire says Coyote has already expanded to Italy, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Belgium and will be available in the United States in January with its main service and an iCoyote application for iPhones.

The Mini Coyote is the size of a cellphone and fits on a car’s dashboard. When a subscriber to the system spots a mobile radar unit beside the road, the driver pushes a button on the device that sends a signal to a central computer giving the location and direction of travel being watched. Three seconds later, the computer sends a warning to all other subscribers within 12½ miles of the point.

Jean-Marc Van Laethem, chief executive for Coyote, started the company with a partner in 2006. Today, there are 250,000 subscribers in France.

Click here to read the entire article.

Transportgooru Musings: As rightly pointed out in the source article, I wonder how this product would compete against the ones that are already in the market place, especially those that are already doing what exactly the  Coyote is designed for.  One particularly popular application on the ever expanding iPhone market is the “Trapster“, also relies on the same principles (crowd sourcing) and has made serious inroads with roughly 50,000 downloads per day, ranking it the 2oth most popular application in the iPhone’s App store.  Even if Cayote starts todays, it still has a long way to go before catching up with Trapster and its ilk that have firmly established themselves.  Maybe it was a good sell in France and some European markets where there is little competition from SmartPhone market applications such as Trapster but in the US it will be a bloody battle before Cayote even makes a mark.  Me thinks, Cayote is a tad bit too late to enter the US market. Also, I think the days of walking into a store to buy a product that is exclusively designed to detect radar signals are fast coming to an end and the future of such “busting” applications are pointedly looking at mobile smartphone platforms such as the iPhone and Droid.  It would be interesting to see how the company takes that subscription-based business model from European markets and applies that to the US market.  That said, Cayote must have some compelling data that convinced them to make the product for sale at brick and motor stores. Let’s see how they do it in the days ahead…

(Source: Washington Post , FoxNews.com, & CNET)

Image Courtesy: CNET - Trapster alerts you to nearby speed cameras and "Smokey takin' pictures."

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.”

The free program uses the GPS receiver built into new iPhones to track a driver’s location and warn of nearby speed traps and red light cameras. It’s also available for phones running Google Android and some BlackBerries.  Drivers can add new locations to the app by hitting buttons to mark speed traps and red light cameras for other drivers. Users can also rate the accuracy of speed trap reports, which helps weed out fake inputs.

It’s been nearly a year since the debut of Trapster, a controversial but popular app that alerts you of nearby speed traps, cameras, and the like. It’s had more than 1 million downloads, and is “getting about 50,000 downloads a day right now” to add to that.

Version 3.5 released back in September, bringing with it some impressive–and, for many users, long-awaited–new features. Here’s the rundown ((courtesy of CNET):

• Improved interface Five features (some of them new) are now accessible by tapping blue icons that span the right side of the screen.
• Bluetooth audio If your car supports Bluetooth, you can pair Trapster to your stereo to get audio alerts over your speakers. Even better, if your car supports A2DP (i.e. stereo Bluetooth), you can take advantage of:
• Built-in iPod controls Tap the little musical-note icon to slide open Trapster’s iPod audio controls. Obviously, you don’t need stereo Bluetooth to use them, but it sure is a nice combo.
• Rotating maps Trapster tacks your position in real-time on a moving map. Now, that map can rotate depending on your direction of travel rather than staying in “always-North” mode. The top blue icon toggles this feature on and off.
• Real-time traffic The bottom blue icon slides out a Google Traffic map, which shows you trouble spots in your area. Handy, but it’s too bad the developers could’t integrate this with the main map instead of requiring you to view a second one.

Image Courtesy: Trapster

Trapster crowdsources the data from its users who report speed traps.  This information is stored in the server and sharing with other Trapster users who come later near the same location, thus making the road safe . The more users, the more data, and the safer the roads are for speeders. The app potentially can help users speed or run lights more often. Nonetheless, police are largely supportive of Trapster, because they hope it will get users to slow down.

“Anything that gets people to slow down on the highway, or drive in a more responsible manner, is a good thing,” said Corinne Geller, public relations manager for the Virginia State Police.  She said the state itself uses that logic to announce some red light cameras and speed-limit enforcement areas.  “We don’t hide,” Geller said.

Here are some interesting stats from the Trapster website (as of Sep 10, 2009)

• 1,621,254 Total Trapster users world-wide
• 1,402,349 iPhones using Trapster
• 818,205 Traps reported world-wide
• Trapster is the 20th most downloaded app for the iPhone out of all 85,000 odd apps.
• Everyday more people download Trapster for iPhone than all other traffic/driving related apps COMBINED.

Click here to read more.

(Source: BBC)

A spate of car crashes across Russia has killed more than 100 people in one week – leading the government to blame the country’s “systemic” road problems.

Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev blamed criminal negligence and a road culture lacking basic driving skills.

He admitted Russian roads are bad, infrastructure is weak and drivers often chat on their mobile phones at high speed or drive while drunk.

Over 10,000 people died on Russian roads in 2009 – Europe’s highest toll.

In the last week a drunk driver in Perm hit a pregnant woman and child in a car-park, killing them both.

The Russian government has made earnest attempts to combat bad driving – including employing legions of traffic police with stop and search powers.

But Mr Nurgaliev admitted most drivers in Russia still think they can break the law and get away with it.

Click here to read the entire article.