carpf.it - Following the footsteps of the police

South Tyrol runs on WhatsApp traffic groups. People share police checkpoint locations, accidents, and road closures in real time. It works, but each group is capped at 1,024 members. So there are dozens of them, each covering a different valley or town, with no shared view of what's actually happening on the roads at any given moment.

carpf.it is my attempt at fixing that. It's a map where anyone can report a traffic jam, a construction site, an accident, or a speed trap. One place, all of South Tyrol.

The UX problem I haven't solved

The idea works better in theory than in practice. Sending a WhatsApp message takes four seconds. Opening a PWA, finding your location on a Leaflet map, and picking an incident category takes considerably longer — and most people aren't willing to do that while sitting in traffic. The WhatsApp groups have thousands of active members; carpf.it gets around 100 unique visitors a day. That gap is the problem I haven't cracked yet.

Part of it is habit. People already have WhatsApp open. Switching to a separate app, even a fast one, adds just enough friction that most don't bother. I've been thinking about a simpler reporting flow — maybe a one-tap "I see police here" button without any map interaction — but haven't shipped it yet.

The tech

The frontend is Nuxt 4 with a Leaflet map for rendering incidents. Reports go into PostgreSQL and expire automatically after a few hours so stale data doesn't clutter the map. The app is served as a PWA so it installs on mobile like a native app, though as mentioned above, that convenience hasn't translated into many active reporters yet.

Where it stands

It's live, it works, and a small group of people use it regularly. Whether it ever displaces the WhatsApp groups is an open question. The network effect those groups have built up over years is hard to compete with. For now I'm keeping it running and seeing whether the reporting flow improvements make a difference.