Best Apps to Help You Save Time on Your Commutes

We all know that Traffic Technology is evolving at the speed of light. Also, the moment you drive off the lot you might find out that some insane new technology just came out! For this reason, we’ve compiled the best apps you can download to help you save time on your work commute. It will help you avoid, accidents, traffic, police stops and radars or basically anything that will prevent you from getting home fast.




Garmin Street Pilot 

This expensive software with photo- realistic mapping and right-now prompts, which worked well even when you are cruising through rural areas without a cell signal. That detail and immediacy are the result of maps that live locally on your smartphone, not in the cloud. Another distinguishing feature is Garmin's awesome mass-transit database. The app can route you to the nearest parking garage and it will drop a virtual pin on the map to help you remember your car's location. It even knows the bus schedule and will help you find the nearest Bus/Metro/Ferry stop. Live traffic information is provided by Here and augmented by crowd sourced data.





Waze

Recently purchased by Google we still need to say, it's not Google Maps with added directions. The maps and routings are built by 50 million worldwide users. Traffic data in the U.S. is based entirely on the progress of "wazers" currently driving. These generous volunteers provide information on speed traps, accidents, and other road events, which fellow wazers confirm and update. But Waze needs an internet connection; lose service and most of the info is unavailable. The police and traffic warnings are highly reliable, and points-of-interest searches are augmented by larger databases such as Google, Yelp, and Foursquare. This is basically a game-changer in the Traffic Apps of the world.




Scout

This product comes from mapping- and traffic-service provider Telenav, so they know what they are talking about.In case you don’t know who they are, they are the inventors of In-Car Mapping systems. We like the layers of information that come with directions, such as weather forecasts. Two other features stand out: OnMyWay texts contacts that you're en route, and the Meet Up function lets multiple users see the others' progress in real time. Scout also acts as an event guide, with listings of movie times, concerts, and so on. In-app upgrades include speed traps and speed cameras. Like Waze, Scout's prompts may be a beat slower than those of Garmin's StreetPilot, but, hey—it's free! We also love that you can choose a monster truck as the icon for your car. Basically, this is a very contender! Don’t miss out on it.




Trapster 

Directions and traffic alerts aren't the only ways to improve your commute—apps can also help you steer clear of cops, drive green, or find a charge. For those averse to tickets and fines, Trapster uses voice prompts to flag red-light and speed cameras along with known speed traps. Data is crowd sourced from 20 million users, and accuracy is solid.

Top 5 Audiobook Recommendations

The Invention of Wings: A Novel 

Written by: Sue Monk Kidd

Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
Summary: From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees comes a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women. Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world. Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City 

Written by: Rajiv Chandrasekaran 
Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
Summary: The Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, takes us into the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupation in Iraq. In this bubble separated from wartime realities, the task of reconstructing Iraq is in the hands of 20-somethings chosen for their Republican Party loyalty. They pursue irrelevant neoconservative solutions and pie-in-the-sky policies instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity, angering the locals and fueling the insurgency.

Divergent, Book 1 

Written by: Veronica Roth

Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
Summary: In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue - Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is - she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

   

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War 

Written by: Robert M. Gates

Length: 25 hrs and 42 mins
Summary: From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vivid account of serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House, he thought he'd long left Washington politics behind: After working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happily serving as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.

Sycamore Row

Written by: John Grisham  

Length: 20 hrs and 50 mins  
Summary: Seth Hubbard is a wealthy man dying of lung cancer. He trusts no one. Before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree, Hubbard leaves a new, handwritten, will. It is an act that drags his adult children, his black maid, and Jake into a conflict as riveting and dramatic as the murder trial that made Brigance one of Ford County's most notorious citizens, just three years earlier. The second will raises far more questions than it answers. Why would Hubbard leave nearly all of his fortune to his maid? Had chemotherapy and painkillers affected his ability to think clearly?