The black burn marks on the yellow box in Queen’s Drive will tell you all you need to know about what they think of speed cameras in Swindon.

The Wiltshire borough’s Tory-run council has become the first in Britain to abolish the cameras after it refused to pay the £320,000-a-year cost of maintaining them.

Peter Greenhalgh, the councillor in charge of highways, claimed that the cameras were “a blatant tax on motorists”. He said that, instead, the money would be spent on road safety projects that save lives, rather than fill Treasury coffers. Opponents of the move have told the council that it will have “blood on its hands” when the first person is killed by a speeding driver.

Wiltshire Constabulary will use mobile cameras and handheld radar guns to monitor drivers’ speeds in the town.

Swindon, home to a Honda car factory, would be a boy racers’ idea of heaven if it were not for the cameras. The town is crisscrossed by dual carriageways and roundabouts, and young drivers of souped-up “hot hatches” regularly gather for high-speed cruises and “burn-ups”.

In the Swindon branch of Halfords, the country’s largest, someone was buying “Ready, Steady, Gone” exhaust tailpipes, which are the size of Coke cans, £1,500-a-set alloy wheels with low-profile tyres and aluminium “racing pedals”.

The boy racers are easy to spot in their uniform of baseball cap, shellsuit and trainers. They sit, low down in bucket seats, barely able to see over the wind-screen as they twitch in time to booming sound systems. Paul, the manager of a car rental company, said: “There are loads of boy racers in Swindon. You always see them in the McDonald’s car parks. Fifty per cent of my customers have at least one SP30 speeding conviction.” The council will now consider a range of alternative antispeeding devices, from sleeping policemen to more signs.

The decision to remove the cameras from Swindon will be closely monitored by road safety and motoring organisations. Edmund King, the president of the AA, said: “It is fine to remove cameras if they are replaced by cops in cars and interactive slow-down signs. However, we do not want to see a road safety void in Swindon. Saving lives on the road is more important than party political wrangles over camera funding.”

Brake, the national road safety charity, described the decision as “a very dangerous experiment with people’s lives”. Jane Whittam, its spokeswoman, said: “Speed cameras are an important tool in catching drivers who insist on breaking the law and putting lives in danger.”

Celebrations by boy racers may be premature. Swindon council does not have the power to remove the three fixed-speed cameras. From April, the cost of maintaining them will have to be met by the other members of the camera partnership – the police, Wiltshire County Council and the Highways Agency. A borough council spokesman said: “If the partnership wanted to pay for fixed cameras to continue, they could do so.”

The number of traffic police has fallen by a fifth in the past decade, with traffic laws now largely being enforced by cameras (Ben Webster writes). There are now 1,507 fewer police officers engaged in patrolling the roads than there were in 1998, when the number was 7,806, according to a written answer to a question in the Commons. Over the same period the number of camera fines more than quadrupled to two million. The AA said that cameras were an inadequate substitute for police because they could not detect a drunk driver.

Money Central: the 10 craziest parking tickets of all time