Austin, Texas (Business Wire) Drivers in Travis County, Texas, have a new source of information about the location of police laser and radar enforcement points: the Sheriff’s Office itself.
Last week, while thousands of technical geeks and entertainment mavens descended on Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Interactive conference, technology leadership was already running rampant in the capitol city. The Travis County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) is using advanced mobile phone technology to make the roads safer for drivers. They are doing this using Trapster, the most downloaded driving and navigation related application in the world. The TCSO have been given special access to the Trapster system, where they can enter not only laser and radar enforcement points, but accidents, road closures, traffic jams, dangerous intersections, and other road hazards.
The Trapster application already plays a spoken alert when a user approaches a location that has been entered by other Trapster users. But now Trapster has released a new version of the iPhone application that shows a TCSO badge when a driver approaches a location that was entered by the traffic enforcement officers themselves. Several other police departments across the U.S. have now also partnered with Trapster. Those notifications will be live in the coming weeks, and widespread adoption is expected.
“We are grateful that the partnership with Trapster gives us another tool to notify the public about road conditions as well as gaining compliance with the speed laws to make the streets of Travis County safer,” says Sheriff Greg Hamilton.
“Our partnership and support from the Travis County Sheriff’s Office represents enormous progress for us.” says Pete Tenereillo, Founder and CEO of Trapster. “Drivers just want to get from point A to point B safely and efficiently, and they definitely don’t want a citation. Law enforcement shares the exact same objectives”.
With 4.6 million users, and growing between 20,000 and 50,000 per day, Trapster far surpasses any other downloaded navigation or driving-related app, and it is the number one most downloaded app in the Navigation category for iPhone and BlackBerry app stores. It is also available for Android, Nokia, Palm, and Windows Mobile phones, and GPS devices such as Garmin and TomTom. The service is completely free.