After spotting a post on a local group on social media advising people of the location of a mobile speed trap, somebody posted this link:
Just made me wonder whether a; This is actually correct or not, and b; the implications of this for Waze users in reporting police positions.
Any views?
There’s probably some way around it in that Waze doesn’t specifically say that it’s a speed trap. The police ahead warning could be them attending an accident/incident or just stopped for a coffee & donut?
This sounds like click-bait to me. Here in Runcorn the police regularly post on social media that they are doing speed traps on roads, even with photographs, so they’ll have to start fining themselves it that’s the case.
The answer is pretty simple - you cannot report a mobile speed trap with Waze. Even when people report “Police”, the majority of reports I see are nothing to do with speed traps.
Anyway, if you don’t subscribe to the “they want to punish us/make money” brand of authority-hating, then the reason for speed traps is pretty clear - they want us to slow down, and being seen to enforce the speed limit is a very good way of doing this.
If this was a genuine issue, Waze would have done something about it themselves: as they did in France, where apps reporting fixed camera positions are illegal; so Waze in France can only report “enforcement zones”.
It’s similar to the issues around using your phone whilst driving. Every year or so, some newspaper will generate a new clickbait article about it and the forums will have a brief flurry of “does this mean I can’t use Waze?”. But the law hasn’t changed in a couple of years and hasn’t changed substantively in much longer.