Unknown antennas popping up on traffic lights. RFID?

[telxonmaster]

Cameron,

Sounds like what the Traffic Engineer told me. At this intersection, before the RF sensors, they had one of the detector cameras. They were made by Aldis, I believe. some of the other traffic cams are PTZ (pan tilt zoom) and seem to be programmed to view each lane for a predetermined amount of time.

I don't know why I thought the flat antennas were RFID, but I have to agree that they are just traffic sensors.

[N0YFE]

There is a new type of vehicle tracking used to monitor traffic speeds and drive time. Many vehicles now have blue tooth devices that send out their "MAC" address and all they need to do is read the "MAC" address when it passes under an antenna and can figure out general vehicle speeds and traffic times.

One good suggestion is to turn off auto discovery on your bluetooth devices.

Then again, if you start to match a blue tooth device and then tie that into a video camera you could start to get some more specific information on vehicles.

Houston TranStar and Bluetooth Traffic Monitoring

[gewecke]

Useful information to know, thanks.
This is only one of several reason why I refuse to own a newer vehicle! No GPS to be used to track me, no computer under the hood to allow snooping on my driving habits. No seatbelts installed as OEM, so seatbelt stops do not apply.
Old is Gold!

[dksac2]

It's big BROTHER. They are taking your picture, scanning in on the fingerprints in your vehicle, scanning your drivers license and X-Raying your vehicle for evil assult weapons. They also have mind reading software so they know if your going to Lowes or Home Depot.

I could tell you more, but they would lock me up in a FEMA camp, might take the whole buch of us.

John

P.S., I also think they help make the traffic jams worse

It was funny on how many cameras went up in little Jackson Hole, WY when Bush became Pres and Chaney who lives in JH became our leaders. Wonder if anyone watches them anymore ??????????????

I really hope no one took me serious, oh shoot, my tin foil hat just fell off, gotta sign off.

[telxonmaster]

Cameron, that's pretty much what I've gathered as well. I've also seen the same kind of "patch" antennas on temporary setups by the highway, and I'm pretty sure they are for counting traffic.
Speaking of counting traffic, MoDOT has one of those pneumatic tube counters in front of my house and the "bump bump" is driving me nuts!

[Jay911]

(apologies, quoted the wrong person. My post is in response to the question/comment about seeing the "output" from the traffic sensing cameras.)

My understanding - at least from the cameras in operation here in Alberta - is that they don't have any "output" per se, but operate on a similar method as some security camera systems use. The camera is fixed in position (no pan/zoom/etc) and a "snapshot" is taken - in the traffic cameras' case, of an empty intersection. Once put into operation, they continuously compare the "live picture" to the "snapshot" stored in memory, and if they don't match, that implies there's traffic queued, and the lights are cycled.

Don't ask me how it works when darkness, fog, smoke, snow, or rain gets in the way. What I do know is when we had a windstorm here a few years back, one camera at a particular intersection was nudged just enough out of alignment that the picture was always "different" than the stored image, and the lights were cycling every 30 seconds for several days, even with no traffic around for miles.