Measuring Car Speed

My solution took the form of two infrared photoelectric gates along the road, connected to a data-logging microcontroller. Each gate included a pulsed infrared source on one side of the road and a receiver on the other side of the road. With two gates I could measure the time of arrival, velocity, acceleration, and length of each car (although I had to assume that the acceleration (rate of change of velocity) was constant.) You can examine the data yourself to see what the traffic statistics are like. I didn't notice any correlation between car size and speed. You would expect to see a correlation between size and acceleration (note the setup was near a stop sign) and there is one, but it may be mostly artifact due to non-constant acceleration (which I couldn't directly measure).

All electronics and hardware were designed for the purpose, mostly out of spare parts I happened to have. I ended up with a car timer with 0.5 millisecond resolution, running standalone on lead-acid batteries for up to a week, logging data in a 128kB SRAM. Everything was waterproofed against rain and camouflaged against potentially sticky-fingered passerby (the one commercial item, the "Blue Earth Micro" microcontroller was $200).

As it turns out, about 88% of traffic was actually speeding, but on average only by about 4 mph. Oh well! As expected for the large sample size, the distribution of car velocities follows a gaussian. The cumulative plot of the data (solid line) lies almost exactly along the gaussian fit (dot-dash).

• photos of the system
• small sample of raw data (6 kB)
• larger sample of raw data (76 kB)
• Results: histogram plot of car speeds

IR transmitter schematic: GIF [59k] Postscript [27k]

IR sensor/preamp schematic: GIF [56k] Postscript [31k]