Sweden: Their locations are public. There is even an official API.
They are mostly located in sane places.
Apps like Waze consume this API and warn drivers if they’re at risk of getting caught. It’s the deterrence/slowdown at known risky spots they’re after, not the fine, I guess.
I heard that apps warning drivers this way are illegal in Germany?
The typical driver who does something like 10 over everywhere is probably not the biggest safety hazard.
When I lived in a small town in Sweden, the problem was that at night some drivers would blow down the country roads and straight through the small towns at crazy speeds assuming that there was nobody around. On some nights/weekends there were also zero police on duty in the whole municipality, they would have to be called in from a neighboring, larger, municipality.
Because the point is to slow the traffic down, not to extract revenue from the peasantry.
Same as the difference between an obvious speed trap and a "gotcha" speed trap.
Aside: what's up with the traffic speed cameras in Sweden? It feels like they're not designed to catch anybody. In my recent drive there it seemed like most of the cameras were in an 80 zone just before it switch to 50 for a tiny town. They wouldn't catch a typical driver who does something like 10 over everywhere -- they would likely have already started slowing down for the 50.
In my city in Canada, that camera would be in the 50 zone.