It's one of those eternal urban secrets. What the heck is inside those green boxes on the poles of lampposts? The answer, according to Gothamist's Flickr findings, is... nothing high-tech, sadly, but a piece of circular graph paper with a needle on top of it (sort of like a record player) that monitors the volume of vehicles on the road 24/7 and collects data. When compiled, those squiggly round patterns, a.k.a. "traffic count" information, lead to a map of the state that shows the most heavily traveled streets. [Gothamist]
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