I mean, one goes to the government to help all citizens, one lines the pocket of a corrupt cop and does not benefit society in anyway.
So yes, there is a huge gulf of difference between the two.
Also an official ticket goes on record so the cop can tell if you've had many and maybe deserve a more severe punishment, the bribe is never recorded so we can't track the bad drives in this instance.
It motivates him to stop speeding drivers which is good for society.
To your second point, maybe a better system would be the policeman gets paid a commission on the tickets he issues so they're still recorded. But if it's not set up that way, bribery might be more effective than not.
Some try to dismiss this by saying that there are areas with lower speeds - yes; they're placed where you need to slow down anyway, it's more like "hey buddy, beware of this sharp curve" rather than "we will milk your wallet if you go 1 km/h over this idiotically low speed". I go to Berlin regularly (500km) and my speed average including the slowdown areas is around 230 km/h and I'm not even close to the fastest one on the road.
The best thing about this? The German diesel engine - drinking less fuel at these speeds than an American truck on idle.
No, it motivates him to stop any driver that can't be confirmed to not be speeding under the level of 3d-party scrutiny the cop judges he risks to get under the circumstances.
And also the ones that are more likely to offer more money.
Until you have "cops" every 10 miles on the freeway all demanding a bribe at gunpoint.
"Corruption" is sand in the gears of everything.
You can't go from point A to point B in a consistent amount of time or money. You can't order something and expect it to work without triple checking everything yourself. etc.
We have a great example of the pernicious effects of corruption: Russia couldn't roll over Ukraine because corruption completely hollowed out their military.
There's a couple of places around the country where it's known that the police do shakedowns (although they certainly don't point guns at you). I guess especially corrupt police work in those areas.
But for the most part I am much less likely to get stopped for minor traffic violations than I would be back home, where bribing the police isn't a thing. I'm sure there are other countries where police shakedowns is a problem, but it's not just a simple equation of bribable police = shakedowns.
If you pay a speeding ticket, isn't that like participating in corruption by buying your way out of punishment for endangering people? Is it really morally any different from paying a bribe to the policeman who catches you speeding in a country where that's the common way? In both cases, you pay for speeding and your money ends up going towards the policeman's income.
Forming a personal connection with the interviewer when applying for a government job. Now you're suddenly like his friend and he's more inclined to select you. Maybe he expects to have a good relationship with you in future and gain intangible benefits from that if he hires you.
In my country, teacher jobs have to be publicly advertised, presumably to combat nepotism. But schools regularly hire internally and their advertisement includes a statement like "no actual vacancy" telling people not to waste time applying. I guess they're following the law but still corrupting the ideal of not favoring your friends.
It seems like you have to have a deep understanding of how and why the systems works the way it does to figure out if a particular action is morally corrupt or not. You can just follow the law but that seems to allow some society-harming corruption and nobody feels guilty about it.