It’s neither his snow tires nor underarm product that gives Jeff Sherard such confidence each day driving between his home in Boulder and his job in Longmont.
Rather, it’s a tool in his iPhone called Trapster.
Trapster is the latest in fuzz-busting that reduces the threat of traffic tickets for drivers who push the speed limit.
Smart-phone users download the application for free and turn it on when they sit behind the wheel. It integrates global positioning data from their phones with live reports about police hiding at off-ramps, say, and other warnings such as speed traps and photo radar cameras. It sends alerts when the threat of a speeding ticket rises.
“Live police” or “trap ahead,” belts out a voice that sounds curiously like my neighbor Lou.
Sherard got hooked last year after getting three tickets in 18 months. Trapster helps his daily commute along the “Diagonal” between Boulder and Longmont, where he tends to “space out” when the speed limit slows from 65 mph to 55 mph.
“My incentive isn’t to break the law but to help me be more aware,” he says.
Still, the 43-year-old high-tech manager admits to getting a certain kick from the anarchy of the application.
“There’s a slight satisfaction in beating the cops,” he says.
Sherard knows that by going public about his Trapster use — not to mention his route to and from work — he risks making a target of his blue Jeep Wrangler. But it’s worth getting the word out, he says, because, like any social-networking tool, it works better with more users.
“It’s all about building a community,” he says.
“Users walk a fine line between wanting to recruit other users and feeling reluctant to be quoted bragging about how they’re sticking it to The Man,” adds Trapster founder and CEO Pete Tenereillo.
Ever the huckster, Tenereillo claims 525,000 users worldwide and boasts that law enforcers “actually like” his product.
“They’re like, hey, if this is gonna get people to slow down, that’s great,” he tells me.
Which made perfect sense until I remembered that Trapster, when not droning out alerts, leaves drivers free to speed up or blow through red lights.
“A lot of people look at it as a game. I’m not sure how somebody in good conscience would do anything that would prevent us from keeping the roads safe,” says Trooper David Hall of the Colorado State Patrol, not sounding to me much like he likes it.
Since hearing about Trapster, I remembered the CB radio my dad used through the ’70s. His handle was the “Jolly Greene Giant,” and mine was “Little Sprout.” He and a dozen or so commuters grew so close over years of warning each other about “smokeys” that they took to meeting each week for pancakes at Howard Johnson’s.
As a kid riding in my dad’s Mustang, I would shout out to the group each morning and viewed it as renegade whenever they dodged a ticket.
Now, like everyone else, I curse the photo radar van and have tried to talk my way out of tickets. I can see what’s neat and vaguely democratic about a gizmo that unites users toward a common, fuzz-busting goal.
But Trapster is 10 times more powerful than my dad’s posse of smokey-watchers, making it more dangerous, with no conversation and none of the soul.
There’s something discomforting about a covert “community” of strangers, convinced of their invincibility and rising up around the vision of the world as a giant speed trap.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
