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Since the beginning of this week I have seen twelve sets of those funny pairs of rubber strips put across the road with a box chained to the nearest lamp-post. My journey crosses two boroughs and different types of roads (fast/slow)… what are they generally used for? Can I expect a set or roads or a new roundabout to appear any time soon?
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Golden River traffic monitors.
Collects traffic movement data.
Also used for collection of data on vehicle speeds. Having had complaints of vehicles speeding through certain areas the devices are put down to establish if in fact there is a problem.
www.clearview-intelligence.com/blog/golden-river-celebrates-40-years-of-traffic-data-collection-and-more
Last edited by: Fullchat on Fri 29 Sep 17 at 15:15
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I always thought that they were for monitoring traffic volumes.
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Traffic volume might fit for one of the areas I’ve seen them, right outside a very popular private school where the parents have to wait to pull out into the road, maybe they have asked a for a mini roundabout to be considered.
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About 10 sets of these have appeared across our small town in the last week or so.
Local online wisdom is that they are to monitor speed as evidence gathering as to whether a town-wide 20mph is merited. Its said that 24mph is the crucial measure for existting speed. If that is so I am surprised as the margin of error in two rubber strips manually laid a few inches apart must be considerable. My guess is that they are simply to count vehicles.
Happy to be corrected by someone who knows.
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One rubber tube can count the axles. Two rubber tubes can do that and measure the speeds. I think they can also apply algorithms to the data logged to infer vehicle types.
They are just empty tubes, and the air pulses when a pair of wheels runs over them are logged.
A few years ago there was a campaign here for traffic calming. They put some across the road just before the crossroads on a narrow approach were there is no footway and a row of houses with front doors at the roadside. Within a day they were ripped up because the cars were braking so hard at that point.
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It has been said that if you jump up and down on them you can hear the box clicking.
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When I was a kid they were using twin wires across the road to check speeds or numbers or something.
We used to spend hours riding our bikes to and fro over them...
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A friend of mine used to work at the Road Research Laboratory and told me that they apply correction factors for abuse depending on the type of neighbourhood.
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As a schoolchild in the sixties I used to catch the bus home. They put one of these systems right by the bus stop. There was a little grey box with a counter that increased by one each time you stamped on the tube.
Over the course of a term I must have singlehanded put about an extra trillion cars on the streets. I suspect the traffic lights, roundabouts and 20 limits in that town to this day are all my fault.
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Well done Crankcase, good to hear someone else was a rebel child too:)
Pat
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I bet they had a lot of faith in the West Somerset countryside...
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On my drive home on Friday at least 3 of the sets that I go over have now become single strips, not sure how they are fixed to the road but they've either come undone or maybe cut??
I guess that will mean the data collection has stopped? as they aren't remotely accessed the controllers wouldn't know that one has failed to come out and repair it.
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>> I guess that will mean the data collection has stopped? as they aren't remotely accessed
>> the controllers wouldn't know that one has failed to come out and repair it.
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It will be the council traffic planners, the bloke in a van who set them up will spend weeks doing daily checks and repairs. Even if you had remote monitoring someone would have to replace damaged sensor tubes frequently. I have heard that people who think they are speed traps have been known to brake heavily across the tubes.
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Rubber strips - what are these used for? - Fullchat
