City Hall Is Searching for Boston's Safest Driver

It's time to prove you don't drive like the Masshole everyone thinks you are. As part of its continuing bid to make city streets safer, Boston City Hall on Monday announced it will hand out $9,000 in prizes for its new safe driving competition. To compete, you will need to download its new "Boston's Safest Driver app," which will track your driving skills, give you feedback on how to improve and show how you compare to others."Our top priority is creating streets that are safe for Boston's pedestrians, cyclists and drivers."[/pullquote]"Our top priority is creating streets that are safe for Boston's pedestrians, cyclists and drivers," Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said in a statement. "We know that when drivers are more attentive, we save lives, and this new competition is a fun way to encourage drivers to use more caution when traveling on our streets." The competition runs from now through Dec. 3, and the app lets participants "challenge their friends, see how they rank in their community  and win prizes for improvement each week." Participants can win weekly prizes in multiple ways, including being the best new driver, taking car-free trips or having the top score. The grand prize winner will take away $2,000. The city's new app runs in the background while you're driving and tracks five metrics during each trip: rapid acceleration, harsh braking, sharp turns, at-risk speeding and phone distraction. After a trip is completed, the app will give you a score, how you performed for each metric and what you can do to improve next time. The competition is being done in collaboration with Arbella Insurance Foundation and Cambridge Mobile Telematics, the latter of which developed the app and has developed similar ones for other companies, like Cambridge-based EverQuote. The two organizations provided the funding for the contest."Many people blame smartphones for an increase in distracted driving, and there is some truth to that. Over the past several years, right here in Boston, our team at CMT has shown that smartphone technology can help make people better drivers. The Safest Driver app uses phone sensors to measure distraction and other aspects of risky driving," Hari Balakrishnan, CTO of Cambridge Mobile Telematics, said in a statement. The Boston's Safest Driver Competition is part of Walsh's Vision Zero Boston initiative, which aims to eliminate fatal and serious traffic crashes in Boston by 2030. Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the dollar amount of the grand prize. It is $2,000, not $9,000.