Have seen these all my life but does anyone know what they do and how they work? 2 rubber wires stretching across the road?

by HAK_YT

29 comments

  1. The clue is written on the box “Environmental Traffic Study”

    Its measuring the speed of cars & how many cars per day on that stretch of road as they travel over the two black rubbers.

  3. They should give accurate readings of numbers of cars travelling in each direction a day, plus speed.

  5. We lifted one up once waiting for a car to hit it thinking it would fire the car back like a cartoon.

    Instead it came out the other side of the road and whipped our legs.

    Never messed about with one since.

  6. They’re hollow tubes. You drive over and it sends a puff of air into the box which registers a vehicle has passed.

    There are two tubes to get two readings per vehicle so they can determine the speed people travel from the difference between the two readings.

  7. It counts bothe the amount of traffic and the speed. It works out the speed by counting the time it takes for a wheel to go over one wire / tube then the next.

  8. They are sensors to gather data on how fast cars are driving on that road.

  10. Records how fast you were going and how many cars travelled between a certain time frame

    (speed is determined by how quick the signal is triggered between the two strips)

  11. Ive seen them many times. I always drive slower when going over them.

  14. Round my way this means there is a large area of land nearby that is about to be turned into to housing.

  15. I always make sure I’m doing the limit going over these otherwise next thing I know there will be humps

  16. Arrestor wires for when the US Navy decides to use your street as an aircraft carrier. You’ll be grateful for those when there’s F-16s smacking down outside your house with Tom Cruise getting out of them.

  19. They count the frequency and speed of traffic, for planning etc.

  21. I have always wondered if my bicycle gets registered as a slow car or if it doesn’t register bicycles crossing at all.

  22. How do emergency vehicles impact results? A police car responding to an emergency in the early hours will often do double the speed limit in some 30 zones.

  23. Another question: anyone know why someone would go around slashing all the ones recently installed around Stamford Hill recently?

  24. They measure the number and speed of vehicles.

    I’d guess there have been a lot of complaints about speeding on that stretch of road so they’ve set that up to see how true it is and if it’s worth them putting up a speed camera or other traffic calming measures.

  26. When i cycle over these I hop over the second line to confuse the data.

  27. I drive over them then reverse over and repeat for ages in the middle of night to skew their readings 😈

  29. Transport planner here – these are ATCs (automatic traffic counts) and just count the number of vehicles using the road. They are pneumatic tubes. We use these to calibrate computer models of the current transport network to be able to model what would happen in the future if certain changes were put in. We don’t infer anything about vehicle type or vehicle speed from these; vehicle types are derived from MCCs (manual classified counts) which are either camera based or manually taken.

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