EDIT: since apparently a bunch of people woke up with the wrong foot this morning or forgot to check the group they’re in:
This is a joke. Do not steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras (or anything else for that matter). That’s against the law and you will likely get arrested.
If you’re addicted to crack or any other drugs, please seek professional help.
Speeding cameras are revenue generating equipment, not safety equipment.
Roads are engineered to be comfortably driven at a certain speed. When legislators put a lower speed limit on these roads it creates a safety hazard and a moral hazard. If you want people to drive slower, you have to modify the road to lower it's design speed. These modifications (lane narrowing, for example) are a safety tool, not the speeding camera.
I've never met anyone who thought these cameras were safety equipment!
If these things were actually used to increase public safety I'd be all for them. Unfortunately our current system rewards corruption, so that's not the case. Speed and red light cams are never actually used for safety, they're used to extract money from the populace.
This article is about red light cameras rather than speed cameras, but corporations and municipalities (corrupt or just naive) can be trusted to find ways to fuck over the public for profit using the speed cameras too.
I would be more inclined to trust this stuff if local governments weren't able to make money off of it. If all traffic court fines went to say the state level government then the only motivation for enforcing the law was because the law was good. We don't expect homicide units to be a revenue stream because we have collectively decided that murder is not a good thing to have around.
Can't speak for most places, but in mine, that's exactly the way it works. You can only make a certain percentage of your budget from tickets (and it's not a large amount) before it all goes to the level double above yours.