I am continually amazed at how companies who sell radar detectors and our red light camera database competitors claim to have a more comprehensive database than we do. PhotoEnforced.com was the first US company to start sourcing this data back in 2000 and our next competitor did not come onto the market until 2005. How do they do it? Well, they copied our free database online and started adding to it and selling it as their own proprietary database. Simply ask the next time you want to license Trinity's database when they got started collecting the data and how they did it. You probably won't get a straight answer because they will never admit that they stole information from PhotoEnforced.com. Photoenforced.com has 7,000 - 8,000 locations in our database as of today and it's growing every day. We also have removed hundreds of locations from our database that are inactive or not accurate. What another competitor can claim they have a comparable database that is free?
I have asked several of these companies including to do a public "bake-off" comparing the number of locations in their database. Still, no one wants to compete with crowdsourcing or user generated content because our competitors say they get too many false positives. Here is what Trinity claims on their web site. Trinity is more accurate and complete than other databases because our team gathers more data than anyone else, to give you the most detailed alerts on the market. In addition to the camera locations themselves, we plot:
- the camera type
- directional vectors
- speed limits (where applicable)
- ticket directions
- “no ticket” directions
Why doesn't Trinity publish the locations in the database?
Here is a response from Trinity on their Facebook page. Comparing the number of locations won't give an accurate measure of the quality of the Trinity 2.0 database compared to other databases. For example, some other companies actively promote they have camera numbers into the millions, which would lead to extensive numbers of false alerts. We take great care to verify our camera locations are accurate and update regularly.
PhotoEnforced.com Response
Photoenforced.com started collecting the 10 years ago and have cameras in 1200 markets. It's impossible to gather the data without crowdsourcing. I agree that verification is important but that is why we have 2000+ people per day coming to PhotoEnforced.com and using the database. Not even Google or Navteq with all its resources can verify locations. It's a false claim and your database will always be behind the curve. Post settings Labels Data, Database, Google, Google Maps, Navigation, Navteq, red-light cameras, Traffic, Trinity Published on 10/18/10, 4:11 PM Pacific Daylight Time Links Location Search Description Options Custom Robots Tags default