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South Australia is surprisingly good with the speed camera information they provide. Today's article looks at one source of information provided by South Australia. The information is the daily list of mobile speed camera locations. You can find this list at Traffic Camera Locations. For the coming week South Australia provides for each day, the mobile speed camera locations. They do say that due to operational reasons the locations may change, and that's fair enough. I started to wonder how reliable the list was. I've done random spot checks against Waze in the past and I haven't found the list to be reliable at all. I decided to do a test. On the 12th of June 2025, I decided to record the police reports people made on Waze on an hourly basis, from roughly 8:30am to 11:30pm. Mobile speed cameras are likely to be parked at a location for a period of time, so there's a good chance of the mobile speed cameras being spotted and reported on Waze. The following is the list of mobile speed camera locations for the 12th of June 2025. Of course there's always the chance there aren't enough Waze users reporting cameras so the number of mobile speed cameras may be under reported.
Balmoral Rd, Dernancourt On the 12th of June 2025 I tirelessly recorded the locations of police reports shown on Waze. There were 360 reports. Of the above mobile speed camera locations the following were in the reported locations.
Balmoral Rd, Dernancourt Out of the twenty five published mobile speed camera locations, only eight, but let's include Kings Road since it's close, totalling nine locations were reported on Waze which is 36%. This really is much less than I expected. This test was fairly thorough in terms of checking the Waze map every hour from 8:30am to 11:30pm. Yes, some cameras may have been missed first thing in the morning and some cameras may not have been spotted and reported. But this figure is much lower than I expected. I was thinking of incorporating the daily published mobile speed camera locations into my Speed Camera Locations site for South Australia but it may mean over 60% of alerts would potentially be of no use. In addition, since the reported cameras may only be present for a number of hours, the feedback on Waze is often when people pass a reported police location there's nothing there. For me either issue results in a negative experience for users of my site. Having said that, if people would prefer to receive an alert whilst driving, as it may be better to receive an alert when a mobile speed camera is at a location, than not receiving an alert with the possibility of a small error of judgement causing financial pain. Update: Testing today's mobile speed camera locations I decided to do another test but with location checks done at 08:59, 10:50, 13:03, 15:50, 19:09 and 22:22 AEST (which is half an hour ahead of South Australia time). The following is the mobile speed camera locations list for 19 June 2025.
Alawoona Ave, Mitchell Park There were police reports on Waze for the following mobile speed camera locations.
Alawoona Ave, Mitchell Park Out of the possible twenty five published mobile speed camera locations, ten definite and three likely reported locations, totalling thirteen reported locations, which is 52%. Whilst this is more than the test done on the 12th of June, it still indicates half or less of the sites may be being covered. If people like myself promote the full list of the locations, and if they aren't being covered, then drivers may slow down at additional locations and that can assist the government to achieve their objective of speed reduction with less cost. Ultimately however, the best and most obvious approach is not to speed and none of the mobile speed camera locations, or the sites such as mine that share the locations matter. There are a number of applications that can assist in complying with the speed limit to further assist drivers. None are perfect, but they can help, but ultimately you the driver, need to pay attention and comply with the posted speed limit to avoid the possibility of a speeding fine. If people are interested in me extending my Speed and Camera Alerts web app to include the daily published mobile speed camera locations, I'd be happy to do so, so let me know if this interests you. |
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