Speed camera alerts
A red banner and a spoken warning when there’s a fixed speed camera on the road in front of you — with or without a route set. The timing is worked out from your speed, not from a fixed distance, so you get roughly the same amount of warning at 60 as you do at 110.
The banner sits above the speed pill so it never covers your speed or the turn card. The camera’s own limit is shown on the right of the text, in your chosen units.
Tapping the ✕ dismisses it early. Otherwise it stays until you’ve actually gone past the camera.
Getting it working
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Download the region
Camera locations ship with the map region, so they work with no signal — and a region you haven’t downloaded has no cameras in it. The list reloads by itself whenever you install or delete a region.
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Check the switch
Menu → Ride Settings → the Speed Cameras section → Speed camera alerts. It’s on by default. Turned off, the subtitle reads Alerts disabled.
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Have the sound path sorted
The alert is spoken through the same channel as turn guidance, so if voice guidance is reaching your helmet, camera alerts will too.
Without Premium the section in Ride Settings shows a padlock and describes what it does rather than offering the switch.
How far ahead you’re warned
The trigger is time, not distance. You’re alerted when you’re around 15 seconds from the camera at your current speed, with two hard limits either side:
- Never more than 500 metres out. Beyond that the warning would be stale by the time it mattered.
- Never less than 80 metres out. Closer than that there isn’t time to read a banner, so no alert is raised at all.
In practice: about 250 metres at 60 km/h, about 400 metres at 100, and at a slow crawl the 80-metre floor takes over. Below 5 km/h nothing fires — your direction of travel isn’t reliable enough to know which way you’re facing.
A fixed radius gives a rider on a highway two seconds of warning and a rider in a 50 zone half a minute of it. Working backwards from your speed means the warning lands at the point where you can still do something about it, whatever you’re doing.
Which cameras you get told about
Being within 500 metres isn’t enough on its own. A camera has to pass every one of these:
- It’s in front of you — within 45° either side of the direction you’re travelling. While navigating, that direction comes from your position snapped to the route, which is steadier through corners than raw GPS heading.
- It’s on your road — within 50 metres of your planned route while navigating, or of the road you’re currently on when free riding. This is what stops a camera on the motorway alongside you setting off an alert on the service road.
- You’re facing the way it enforces — where the map records which direction a camera covers, your heading has to line up with that axis within 45°, in either direction. Undivided roads are usually enforced both ways, so the check treats it as an axis rather than a one-way filter. If you’re within 25 metres of the camera the check is skipped entirely — at that range you’re on the road regardless of what the data says.
Cameras with no recorded direction still alert, on the reasoning that a missing tag shouldn’t cost you a warning.
What you’ll hear
The wording changes with how you’re travelling relative to the camera’s limit. Taking a 60 zone as the example:
- Comfortably under — Speed camera coming up, 60 zone
- At or about the limit — Speed camera 60 zone
- More than 3 km/h over — Speed camera 60, you’re doing 72
- Where the camera’s limit isn’t known — Speed camera ahead
The number you hear is the camera’s own recorded limit, which is not necessarily the limit shown in your speed pill — the pill shows the limit for the road you’re on right now.
If the app is mid-sentence with a navigation instruction at the exact moment a camera alert fires, the camera alert is dropped rather than queued — it will not be spoken later. The red banner still appears, so the visual warning is never lost. Camera alerts otherwise cut through whatever else is being said.
Why the banner stays up
It isn’t on a timer. Once shown, the banner stays until one of three things happens:
- You pass the camera. The app watches your distance to it; when that distance has grown for three consecutive position updates and is at least 40 metres past your closest point, you’ve been through it and the banner clears itself. Both conditions are needed — GPS jitter alone will drift a few metres either way while you’re sitting at a light.
- You leave the area. If the camera falls outside the 500-metre envelope — you turned off before reaching it — the banner clears.
- You tap the ✕. Dismissing it manually doesn’t bring it back for that camera.
Keeping it up through the whole approach is deliberate. A banner that vanishes after eight seconds is a banner you glance up and miss. Each camera alerts once per approach — you won’t get a second warning for the same camera while you’re still coming up on it. Ride away and come back later and it re-arms.
If the map data has no speed for that camera you’ll still get the spoken Speed camera ahead, but no red banner. Nothing has gone wrong — there isn’t a number to put in it.
Limits worth understanding
Everything comes from the map data on your phone. There’s no live feed and nothing crowd-sourced, so a camera installed since you downloaded the region isn’t there, and one that’s been removed may still alert. Re-download the region occasionally if you rely on this.
Alerts are an aid to riding to the conditions, not a way to speed between cameras. NavForge will happily warn you about a camera in a 60 zone while you’re doing 72, and that’s a fact about you rather than about the camera.
Rules about camera-warning apps vary between countries and, in some places, between states. Where you ride is your responsibility to know.