What are those wires running across the road for?

Question

lately ive been seeing a lot of these in my town. two wires running parallel across the road with maybe a 2ft gap between them. who puts them there and what is the purpose?

Answer 1

measure traffic volumes over time

Answer 2

They are connected to the timers in the traffic lights.  If a vehicle is not heavy enough, when landing on the wires, it will not cause the traffic lights to go from red to green.

Answer 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_cou...

Answer 4

The single line simply counts the cars that pass over it.

The dual lines monitor how many cars pass over it and their speed. They have set these up all over the place before the holiday weekend. This allows the officers to see were the most serious speeding problems are and pick out the best places to cash in this weekend.

We had the dual lines set up all over Arkansas about a week ago.

Answer 5

Road engineers measure the volume of traffic, to predict future road needs and maintenance.

Answer 6

those are speed and traffic monitoring chords. i work for the Idaho Transportation Commity and we lay them down to see what traffic is like in that area. we determine if we need to increase the speeds of the roads and if we need to widen the road in the future due to the number of passing persons.