What are these for? I see them around quite often. They’re stretched across road and connected to little metal boxes. I’ve been wondering for years. Do they measure the speed of the vehicles or the amount of traffic or what ?
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who
have lost the power of reasoning.
–Voltaire
They usually are there to count traffic. They chart the number of cars versus the time of day on a graph.
Peace,
mangeorge
I only know two things;
I know what I need to know
And
I know what I want to know
Mangeorge, 2000
They’re too inacurate to measure speed. They are usedto measure the traffic so that the city can determine how often itis really worth doing work on the street and when the best time is.
I believe once they find this out, they immediately throw it out the 8th story window and go to work on at the busiest time of ther year.
Cheers.
“C’mon, it’s not even tomorrow yet…” - Rupert
If you need a graphic solution, http:\ alk.to\Piglet
They are car counters. Whereever they show up a traffic light is soon to follow.
I thought they were just there to wear my tires down faster.
The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
Since I’ve mainly seen these near intersections, I’ve always assumed they were to help the powers-that-be make decisions about stop light timing. (i.e. how long to keep the green light on, whether or not to install a stop light, and so on.)
They’re so bored people ( such as myself) can drive over and over and over them, thereby screwing up the data.
I’m not a fallen angel, I’m a risen demon.
So that’s what people up there do for entertainment. 
Actually, it would take you and a lot of your likewise bored friends quite a lot of trips to really screw up the data.
But hey, altitude has that effect on people.
Peace,
mangeorge
They count the traffic and what time of day the traffic is the heaviest. Some companies
use this to see it is worth putting a store in the area. Like a Burger King, ex. If you have a company and are thinking of putting a new store somewhere, you can have them set them up in a location near the place your looking at to see if it is worth putting a store in that area.
“Microsoft: Bringing you yesterday’s technology–tomorrow.”
– **traditional **
Helicopters don’t have arresting hooks.
Actually, the black cables deliver an electric shock to some hapless soul every time a car drives over them. Usually the victims are people who talk about Black Helicopters…
I ‘accidentally’ parked with my rear wheel on one of the cables once. The next morning the cable was lying in shreds in the middle of the road. I guess it doesn’t like having one end anchored to the ground.
Space alien penises.
The boxes are miniature housing units for the space alien, so when it rains, they don’t get their brain wet. You may may have noticed that usually you see several of these black cables and boxes on whatever road you’re driving, a few hundred yards apart. That’s because these aliens with their penises casually extended over the road are taking part in their fraternity “hell week” activities. You may also notice that sometimes they will have a knot tied in them, and ask why they tie a knot in the cable.
It’s because they can.
Sometimes, you may see what looks like a white cable streched accross the road, although most of those only go part of the way accross. If you see one with a little weight on the end, that’s probably the alien formerly known as Prince Albert, trying to make it all the way to the other side.
These aliens were specifically genetically modified to blend in with the earth types. In 1968, a pair of aliens walked up to a gas pump at a Texaco station in Eastern Kentucky, and asked to be taken to the earth leader. When the aliens received no response, one of the aliens drew their laser pistol and fired upon the pump, causing an explosion which landed the aliens on their behinds onto the hood of a Buick approximately 50 yards away. One of the aliens was heard to say, “You know, Fnord, if some guy can hang his prick over his arm and stick it in his ear, it just might not be somebody you want to fuck with”, although this remark may be apocryphal. The experience, however, did impress upon the visitors the need to adapt to the local customs.
Sometimes youll see two of them spaced just right. Those can measure speed as they measure the time from hitting one to the other.
Didn’t Bill Gates start out by building those traffic counters, or something similar?
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What you think of as ‘cables’ are actually ‘micro-overpasses.’ They may look like cables, but they’re really walkways for the teeny-weeny bastards who are taking over the planet.
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free…
T
If there’s no one around, especially behind you, it’s fun / a challenge to lock up your brakes on those hoses. I haven’t destroyed one yet, but I’m going to keep trying…
We saw these all the time when I was a kid walking home from school. The counter box had its display visible through a tiny window, and we’d delight in stomping on the cable and watching the numbers click by (1/2 click per stomp).
I’d like to think I helped speed up the process of the county paving our street. 
Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as swiftly rewarded. You’ll find it an effective combination.
When you see two of them next to each other, they are being used as counters as well. Usually, one of the wires only crosses half the street; in this way, they count the traffic in both directions. 
Hey folks, just for the record, they’re not cables or wires, they’re rubber tubes filled with air. They used to use them at gas stations so when a car drove up to the pumps the attendant could run out and ask, “Fill’er up, Mac? Check yer erl? Knock 'dem bugs off de glass?”… oops… showing my age. Anyway, the traffic counters are the same, when your tire rolls over them it sends a puff of compressed air down the tube to a sensor. BTW, one summer as a teen, I had to run around reading these counters. I also had to sit at busy intersections with a clipboard and monitor the traffic patterns. Hey, it kept me off the street… well, not literally. They are not very effective at measuring speed, because you can’t insure linear speed or even traffic distribution between the sensors. Also, not all vehicles will render enough compression to trigger a count, very narrow tires will sometimes result in a missing pulse. Also, eighteen wheeler can get them confused. Plus, the hoses can suffer from deteriation that also affects performance. All told, they are not very reliable. There are more modern methods that are less expensive, more accurate, more reliable, and don’t annoy drivers.
… More than anyone really wanted to know…