Those tubes are pneumatic traffic counters, and they quietly turn your daily habits into political ammunition. Each axle strike pushes a puff of air to a locked box, logging not just how many vehicles pass, but when, how fast, and how heavy. In a week, they can prove a “quiet” street is a commuter pipeline or that a feared shortcut barely exists at all.
Behind closed doors, engineers and planners translate that invisible record into concrete changes: new stop signs that appear overnight, speed limits that suddenly drop, turn lanes that eat into front yards, or median islands that slice your neighborhood in half. Complaints, petitions, and angry meetings matter less than those numbers. Your commute, your kids’ walk to school, the noise at your bedroom window—every bump over those rubber lines is a silent ballot, cast without consent, shaping the roads you’ll live with for decades.
