There are a few spots on my drive on the A24 which tend to have mobile speed cameras sitting onsite 3-4 times a month.
My speedcam app flags these as mobiles but there’s no apparent equivalent in Waze.
As most UK Wazers should be aware, the vast majority of “fixed” camera sites are actually dummies and the mobile ones are the ones which one really needs to be wary of.
How to handle this?
Sadly Waze only has the ability to show Traffic Light Cameras and Speed Cameras.
Waze at the moment can only show the locations of Average Speed Cameras.
For Mobile Speed Cameras according to This webpage you report them as Police in the App
Other than that we can’t do any more at the moment.
As Hublander says, mobile cameras need to be marked in realtime using the in-app police report option.
As far as the majority of fixed cameras being dummies? This might be true only if you consider the entire UK stock of fixed cameras, but for those of us who spend most of our time driving around certain areas of the country where the local authorities are seriously keen on cameras, it’s far far from true. Greater London is particularly bad in this respect… And then for those of us who also spend time plodding up and down the motorways, the continued desire to move to “managed/smart” motorways means we’ll see even more active cameras installed around the network.
So no, I wouldn’t say mobile cameras are the ones we really need to be wary about - if you’re a regular user of a stretch of road then you’ll most likely know where the mobile units like to lurk and so can adjust your approach speed accordingly even in the absence of any warning, and if you’re not a regular user then you won’t know where the fixed cameras are either, so getting advance warning of those seems to be just as beneficial.
At the risk of reactivating a dormant thread (I didn’t really want to start a new one) I remain utterly baffled by Waze’s policy on mobile speed camera locations.
It puzzles me because, as others have observed, mobile cameras are more prevalent than fixed cameras these days. According to pocketgpsworld.com there are roughly 3,500 Gatso sites in the UK, not all of them working. There are some 8,000 mobile camera sites. And here’s the thing - mobile cameras are not randomly parked wherever the operator feels like it. They use the same known and well researched and calibrated locations chosen for visibility, accuracy, road safety, lack of obstruction and repeatability.
It seems to me the Waze reasoning that ‘cameras are not always there’ is flawed. The locations are always there, the cameras may not be. Just as with Gatso and other fixed camera technologies. There may be a yellow box by the road but there may be no working camera inside it.
Actually most fixed cameras are not “Dummies” because dummy would give the impression that they cannot be used to enforce the speed limit, whilst in reality most can be used to enforce the speed limit.
Take my local area for instance - the Speed Camera partnership installed loads of fixed camera housings, but only actually bought a very small number of the actual “internals” which they used to move around the various fixed housings.
Thus all sites where capable of enforcing the law, but very few actually were at any given time. Obviously as site data comes in the operators will tend to place the internals in the sites that catch the most people and the others will tend to be left empty, however these sites cannot be truly called dummies. I would say that the only sites that can be truly called dummies are those “look a Likes” created by DIY’ers.