Have you been noticing those black cables or tubes cropping up around Lansing recently? I know I have. And I've always wondered what they do.

I'm sure every Michigan driver has driven over these black cables, or tubes, at some point. But what exactly do they do?

What are the Black Cables on Roads Called?

First, let's learn the actual name for these black cables; they're called pneumatic road tubesAnd to understand exactly what these tubes do, I had to turn to the Federal Highway Administration.

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Pneumatic is a fancy word for "containing or operated by air or gas under pressure". So, these tubes use air to produce an electric signal to catalog some combination of data.

What Do the Black Tubes on the Road Do?

Typically, the data these pneumatic tubes collect is "commonly used for short-term traffic counting, vehicle classification by axle count and spacing, planning, and research studies. Some models gather data to calculate vehicle gaps, intersection stop delay, stop sign delay, saturation flow rate, spot speed as a function of vehicle class" and more.

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If you live or drive in the greater Lansing area, you've probably been seeing these crop up more often because... you guessed it... construction.

There is so much construction going on in the greater Lansing area that it's causing a great deal of congestion on the alternate routes people are seeking. I would bet that data is being used by MDOT and other entities to make better decisions when it comes to road closures and detours.

Road Fatalities: Most Dangerous Time, Day, and Month by State

Knowing what dangers are ahead is part of being a good driver. Georgia-based attorneys at Bader Scott gathered information from the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration (NHTSA) to determine the most fatal time, day, and month to be on the road in each of the 50 states.

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U.S News and World Report has ranked all the states according to the quality of their roads. These are the worst 20.

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