wires across the road tied to lamp posts

ACG

What are they?
Usually 2 wires across both lanes.

Today within a 5 mile radius of where I live I have crossed 4 of them.

custardy

traffic measuring i believe

force_ten

traffic counters to monitor volume of traffic using that section of road

Fruit_and_Nut_Case

How high? Could be vandals trying to decapitate cyclists.

BeenThroughItAll

Long time ago I was told one wire was traffic counting, two wires was traffic and speed.


Round here, the wires normally appear for a few weeks, then several months later the speed limit changes, the camera van starts popping up on that stretch, or a fixed camera appears.

ACG

Fruit_and_Nut_Case wrote: »

How high? Could be vandals trying to decapitate cyclists.

If only :P

ACG

That might make sense.
There is a dual carriageway which goes from nowhere to nowhere and passes nowhere which they are planning on expanding from Manchester airport to somewhere else. So I suppose they are monitoring how much of an impact it will have?

OddballJamie

BeenThroughItAll wrote: »

Long time ago I was told one wire was traffic counting, two wires was traffic and speed.


Round here, the wires normally appear for a few weeks, then several months later the speed limit changes, the camera van starts popping up on that stretch, or a fixed camera appears.

Spot on, one for volume, two for speed. A mate of mine used to fit these when he was between proper jobs, he also laid out motorway cones. Fairly lucrative from what I remember. Term danger money used to be mentioned a lot back then.

If it's somewhere you want speed restrictions or bumps fitted in the future, then don't slow down for them.

force_ten

many of the major intersections have a permanent traffic counting loop fitted in the tarmac and connected to a roadside street cabinet that is linked to the highways agency via a phone line so they have real time monitoring of how busy a section of road is

the system that you describe is for temporary traffic counting and are often pneumatically controlled, so basically as you drive over the tubes it sends a blast of air to the counter which records the number of vehicles that drive over it

InsideInsurance

OddballJamie wrote: »

Spot on, one for volume, two for speed. A mate of mine used to fit these when he was between proper jobs, he also laid out motorway cones. Fairly lucrative from what I remember. Term danger money used to be mentioned a lot back then.

If it's somewhere you want speed restrictions or bumps fitted in the future, then don't slow down for them.

Twin wires, if they go across both carriage ways can also be used to record direction as well as count and speed

ACG

Some of them I could understand might be there to monitor speed but others I cant (1 is between 2 round abouts, you would need a ferrarri to build up enough speed to be speeding between them and even then you might run out of space for breaking).