Wires across roads

Max Powers

FatB wrote: »

Although I know absolutely nothing about these wires, it seems pretty obvious that you could easily measure speed between both wires. if it was just for checking the amount of cars then surely one wire would be enough.

*Removes tinfoil hat*

It wouldnt measure which direction if only 1 wire. I was thinking about it, maybe someone might know; the system used would not measure 2 cars that travel over the wires at the same time would it.

letsbet

It should do as the cars would only hit one of the wires at the same time (unless one of the cars was going incredibly fast and/or the other one incredibly slow) as the wires are considerably closer together than the distance between the front and back wheels of a car so you'd imagine it could cope with that. Looking at it another way when the two cars going over the same wire at the same time one of them will already have gone over their first wire and so it should register both but it's an interesting point and it may cause a problem but you'd imagine they'd have that covered as in heavy slow-moving traffic it'd happen quite frequently.

danjo-xx

Seems very old technology wouldn't you imagine they would have something more digital or optical to get the required information.

wobbles

The wires can only measure per axle, not per vechicle. So if 2 cars and trailers go over, it may read as three vechicles. Same for lorries with more than 2 axles. Doesnt seem accurate enough to be of any use to find out traffic numbers

letsbet

The percentage of such lorries using those roads is relatively low as a percentage of the overall traffic I'd imagine so the results wouldn't be skewed too much and the relative amount of traffic would still be fairly accurate anyway.