05/21: Road Counter

I almost stumbled over these rubber tubes strewn across a major arterial road, which are attached to unmarked boxes locked to trees along the median. These are most likely means of tracking and quantifying traffic and car counts. I used to think they could track speed and thus were part of police surveillance. At this scale the rubber tubes represent simply road noise for the driver.  At a much larger scale they could serve as speed bumps which transfer the kinetic energy of passing cars into hydraulic force capable of powering any of a number of things.