Police Radar Detectors have been available for many years now. The early ones and early radar detector technology made it quite simple to use, and avoid radar speed traps, but technology soon moved on, and law enforcement officials were able to do a “click on – click off” technology your radar detector easily could miss, or at least in the instant moment your device picked it up, YOU could miss it.
Then came the ability to “paint” you from the rear, or paint you in motion from an oncoming car.
The next step was laser: Those invisible beams of light and the existing detectors could not pick them up. Suddenly the detector you had paid $249 for in the last year was only half relevant at best.
Now, in 2011, so many of us have smart phones, and the ability to do many things, including know, and relate our position information, to others. For some, this is good. For others, who don’t want their position known, it’s not good, but most of the smart phones do allow the user to switch the GPS on or off.
But along with this an cell technology comes a new ability to receive map overlays that have all the quite recently known speed traps, as well as other things such as current DUI checkpoints, etc. installed, and a whole host of “reporters” constantly feeds this data into the system. Now, without investing $200+ in a police radar detector or police speed detector, for a modest monthly subscription fee of under $10.00, you can have the most current information. An advertisement in a recent Popular Science magazine listed one such company providing this web site (click here) as an information site. Now we can not guarantee this link is active when you read this, nor are we an affiliate or promoting this site. It’s only informational. The old days of flashing headlights, which was limited at best, is now well outmoded.
Of course we must state the obvious: This information is only as good as the input and it’s not inconceivable that the “good guys” might even input a bogus location just to get one to slow down. That can’t be bad if slowing down can improve safety.
In the end, our suggestion would be to have BOTH a program like this AND a good police radar detector or police speed detector.