NEWS Speedcamapp OFFICIAL
CAMERA, ACTION
Speedcam Anywhere lets users video passing cars and then calculates their speed
“The footage can be saved by the user and a report can be generated, including the calculated speed”
TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL
Speeding app allows smartphone users to become DIY traffic police OFFICIAL Footage can be shared with the police, but cannot legally be used to penalise motorists Tristan Shale-Hester
tristan_shale-hester@autovia.co.uk @tristan_shale
A NEW smartphone app allows users to record passing cars with their phone cameras and determine whether drivers are breaking the speed limit. Speedcam Anywhere can be used by pedestrians to take a video of a vehicle suspected of speeding. The software will read the car’s number plate and use DVLA data to identify its make and model, then determine the length between its front and rear axles. The app then compares this data with the video images to calculate the speed at which the car was driving. The footage can then be saved by the user and a report can be generated, including the calculated speed, which can then be shared with a police force or local council. But the app’s information cannot currently be used to penalise drivers in the UK, because the Home Office hasn’t approved it as a certified speed-detection device. Google has allowed Speedcam Anywhere to be published on its Play Store, where it is available for download in the UK for Android devices. But Apple has yet to approve it for distribution on its App Store for iOS devices,
such as iPhones and iPads. The app is also being prepared for launch in the US. Whatever your thoughts about ‘citizen policing’, there are increasing provisions for members of the public to report driving they consider dangerous, such as the Nextbase National Dash Cam Safety Portal. Currently used by 38 of the UK’s 45 police forces, the portal lets drivers upload dash-cam footage of their fellow motorists’ driving habits. A total of 48,610 clips have now been uploaded to the portal – up by 23.1 per cent in the last four months – with the greatest number coming from the West Midlands, followed by Northumbria and West Mercia. Official data acquired by Auto Express back in January revealed a 16 per cent fall in road traffic police officer numbers since 2015, with forces becoming increasingly reliant on public submissions. Speedcam Anywhere was developed by a team of artificial-intelligence scientists, with backgrounds from UK universities and Silicon Valley in the US. Their identities are being kept secret, however, because they claim to have received abusive E-mails from members of the public who disagree with the purpose of the app.
DOES IT WORK? We’ve tested it... WE downloaded the Speedcam Anywhere app and tried it out for ourselves. It offers two modes: regular and pro. The former estimates a passing car’s approximate speed, whereas the latter reads the vehicle’s number plate and offers a more detailed result. A regular check costs one credit and a pro check is five credits. You get 30 credits for free when you first download Speedcam Anywhere; after that, you can buy an additional 1,000 credits for £15. We performed two runs in a car at an indicated 30mph and used the app’s pro mode to record it. The readout was 36.9mph on the first run; on the second, it was 42.9mph. These results were worryingly inaccurate, both drastically overestimating the speed of the car. After recording the video, we noticed there was a delay of around 30 seconds to a minute before the results came in. But this may be because we didn’t have great phone signal at the test location.
KEEPING TABS
Speedcam Anywhere claims to work out how fast a car is travelling, but we found the app was inaccurate when we put it to the test
18 20April2022
