Residents may have noticed a number of black rubber strips running across Routes 7 and 33 over the past few weeks.
If you did, you were looking at Connecticut Department of Transportation traffic counters, which shuffle throughout the state during the year to record annual or bi-annual traffic numbers on certain roads.
According to Kevin Nursick, of the DOT, “the backbone of transportation planning requires you know how many people are using the road. If you don’t… it’s hard to make a scientific decision.”
These traffic counters were placed as part of a “routine” Mr. Nursick said, and did not suggest the state was planning any projects on either Route 7 or Route 33.
“This is all the routine stuff,” he said. “Sometimes when there’s a project we’re initiating there might be a specific kind of count. We can adjust and use more specialized equipment to figure out how many trucks we have on a road versus tractor-trailers and cars.”