Fastest, balanced, or private: what the three route modes do

Three modes, one time budget, and a documented weighting. What each setting optimises for, and which one you probably want.

FlockDetour Research · 2 min read · Product

FlockDetour offers three route modes. They are not vibes — each one is a specific rule applied to the same set of candidate routes, and the rules are worth knowing because they determine what you actually get.

Fastest

Exactly what it says: the shortest travel time, with camera exposure used only to break a tie between two routes of identical duration. This is the baseline every other mode is measured against, and it is always shown alongside the alternative so you can see what a detour costs.

Privacy

Minimises known camera exposure — but not at any price. Every non-fastest mode operates inside a detour budget, expressed as a percentage of the fastest route's duration. A 20% budget on a 30-minute drive means the app will consider routes up to 36 minutes and no longer.

Within that budget, privacy mode takes the lowest-exposure route available. Outside it, the route simply is not a candidate. This is deliberate: an unbounded privacy mode will happily send you an hour into the countryside to skip one reader, and nobody wants that twice.

The budget is capped at 50%. Past that the answers stop being useful.

Balanced

Balanced optimises a documented cost function rather than a single axis: 60% travel time, 40% relative camera exposure, evaluated inside the same detour budget. When two routes score the same, ties break by duration first, then exposure, then the order the routing engine returned them — so the same inputs always produce the same route.

That determinism matters more than it sounds. A route that changes between two identical requests is impossible to reason about, and impossible to test.

Which one to use

  • Fastest when you are late and just want the comparison for information.
  • Balanced for daily driving. It is the default because it usually finds the detour that costs a couple of minutes rather than the one that costs twenty.
  • Privacy when the trip is the point — and read the time cost before you accept it.

The honest caveat

All three modes optimise against known cameras. A route with zero documented readers has avoided every reader in the dataset, which is not the same as every reader on the road. The app is a way to reduce exposure with open data, not a guarantee, and no mode changes that.

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