Google has long been trying to turn Google Maps into the perfect car navigation system. Recently, we’ve seen a whole raft of new features including accident and incident reporting, improved Assistant integration to remove dangerous distractions for the driver, and most recently a speed limit and speed trap notification system. The last one, however, only received a limited roll-out in San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro. This looks set to finally change as Google Maps’ speed camera feature is rolling out to more countries worldwide.
Countries including the US, UK, India, Australia, and Canada will soon have access to the Google Maps speed trap feature
According to a report by Android Police, Google Maps users in Denmark, Poland, and the UK have started reporting that the Google Maps speed trap feature is now live for them. The same report goes on to list Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the U.S. as all receiving the feature, too.
Speed trap alerts are just the latest Waze feature that Google Maps has cannibalized since Google bought the navigation app back in 2013. It comes after the addition of the accident and incident reporting we’ve already mentioned. If anything, it is quite surprising that Google has taken this long to add speed traps to Google Maps.
If you live in a country that isn’t listed above, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean that the feature won’t be coming to your country, too. All that list represents is countries where the feature has been spotted and reported online by Maps users. Google still hasn’t published an official list of countries that will see the feature and until it does, we’ll not know for sure where the feature will roll-out too.
Google Maps just said “there’s a speed camera ahead” I didn’t know it did that.
— Zwakele (@IAmZwa) May 22, 2019
The other option for anybody wanting to access this feature now, whether it is live in their country or not, is to download and use Waze. Google has always maintained Waze as an independent navigation app despite cherry-picking all of the app’s best features to add to Maps.
The fact that Waze already has the feature, however, makes it very likely will roll-out speed traps globally, rather than just to a select group of countries, as it shows that Google already has the data and is already running the feature globally. If you haven’t got speed traps on your version of Google Maps yet, you can expect to have it sometime soon.
