Canberra's speed camera network is set for a shake-up, with the ACT Auditor-General about to release a report into the cameras, which bring in about $11 million a year in fines.
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The government has also announced its first major review of the camera network.
Auditor-General Dr Maxine Cooper has investigated whether the speed cameras are in the right places, whether they are having an impact on speeding, and whether they are reliable.
Speed cameras were introduced in Canberra by the Carnell government in 1999, and red-light cameras followed soon after. In 2012 came point-to-point cameras. There are 13 fixed speed cameras at nine city locations, and another 13 fixed speed and red-light cameras. There are two point-to-point cameras and five mobile camera vans.
In the first year, about $1 million was collected in fines, but the amount has risen dramatically. In each of the past three years, about 60,000 speeding notices were issued and about $11 million collected.
Attorney-General Simon Corbell has asked the University of NSW's Transport and Road Safety Research Group to review the network and its impact on crashes and speeding, with a report due by the middle of the year.
After the NSW Auditor-General reported on NSW speed cameras in 2011, 38 of the 141 fixed-speed cameras in the state were decommissioned since they were found to have no benefit for road safety.
NSW Auditor-General Peter Achterstraat found that overall speed cameras brought about a 26 per cent reduction in crashes and and a drop in fatalities by more than two-thirds.
The director of Transport and Road Safety Research at the University of NSW, Professor Ann Williamson, who is heading the review, said speed cameras could be very effective at reducing speed, but produced different results depending how they were used.
She said her team would look at the mix and locations of cameras in Canberra to check how useful they were and where changes could be made. It would also look at how Canberrans' attitudes to speed cameras and speeding had changed since cameras were introduced. It would not investigate fine levels, nor reliability of camera technology.
''Speed and lack of control of speeding is at the heart of a great deal of the road trauma that we see in Australia,'' she said. ''And it's not just doing 130 on a 100km/h region, but even moderate speeding in urban areas can be a highly risky activity for other people on the road, particularly if they're not protected - bicyclists, motorbikes, pedestrians and so forth.''
Liberal spokesman Alistair Coe said it was high time for a review given the millions of dollars raised from speed cameras.
''What we do know is that in some instances the incidence of accidents around speed camera locations has actually increased rather than decreased,'' he said.
''That in itself should be a worry to the government … [it] should be looking at all the sites and other possible sites to make sure they're in the best possible location.''
