I've seen a lot of traffic lights in the borough been upgraded with these little cameras. I'm assuming they are some sort of motion sensor but they look more like webcams to me.

Anyone know any more about them?

They are probably CCTV, seems to be the "in" thing now for councils to install these to monitor traffic.

Unfortunately, in my experience they don't actually adjust the timings of the lights using these. It's just so some council bod can see the queue forming

Surely, even if they don't use them to make immediate changes, they can be used to monitor whether changes are needed?

I suspect many councils pass on information and use them to validate reports too.

I don't know, they have tons of new ones in Oxford especially on the ring road but if anything the traffic has got worse over the past year.

Then no doubt they put on their finest Montgomery Burns voice and go "excellent, order another 200m of cycle lane paint to see if we can stop this section of free flowing road"

Aside from the "man on the street" guesswork, does anyone actually know?

It's a video vehicle detector by Traficon and very good they are too.

So does this mean they only work as traffic sensors? They don't work as CCTV and do not feed back any motion pictures to a control centre?

Haven't used these before but did see them at a trade event once, given the presence of the MVD as well I would presume they are focused on the stop line area to pick up vehicles instead of using loops, so the image I guess probably wouldn't be of much use.

They're pretty cool little devices. You can use a laptop or whatever to view the image and then draw on virtual loops or different types on the approach. AFAIK, they don't store any of the visual data.

The only bad thing is that they're designed to have a decent height between them and the roadway, which leaves these long extension arms which look horrid IMO. They're an American import, so they've probably been designed for Mast-Arm mounting.