this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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What is this thing?

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Yeah I know these are used for counting vehicles but can they also be used for detecting vehicle speed?

Description: two pneumatic hoses, affixed to a road. They lead to a box that's locked to a telephone pole. Location is southern California. On a minor artery road.

Doubtful that it's to survey if a new stop sign is needed since the next street is minor, dead ends into this one and already has a stop sign. The next intersection with another minor artery already has a stop sign.

Extremely doubtful that a traffic light is being considered since there isn't anywhere near the amount of traffic to justify one.

This is located on a slope. Many cars speed down here. That's why I'm wondering about speed sensing by this device.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

There's almost no reason for having two of them other than to measure speed, otherwise you'd only use one. But it's not for enforcement, it's to see how fast most drivers actually drive the road. This can be used for things like adjusting the speed limit, or testing to see if measures need to be taken to enforce it more strictly, etc. I know there is a hill in my hometown that residents used to always complain about speeding. They used exactly this setup to track the speed of drivers. They found that there was no excess in speeding, the steep hill required more gas to maintain speed, and people generally associate louder engine noise with higher speed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

There's two of them to determine the direction.