VIDALIA — Vidalia’s traffic lights have cameras focused on the streets below, but those cameras aren’t there to make sure you behave.

Despite their appearances, these new devices, installed by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, aren’t standard traffic cameras. They’re sensors, designed to know when traffic is waiting to cross Carter Street.

“You’re not going to be able to view traffic through the cameras,” DOTD District 58 Engineer Administrator Ricky Moon said. “The camera would pick up that a car is sitting there and tell the signal to change.”

The cameras are replacing an older sensor system, wire loops that were installed in the pavement and detected when a vehicle rolled over them.

“As traffic rolls over the pavement, and the heat and cold change the (size of the) pavement, that breaks the loops,” Moon said.

The traffic signals that the sensors control will also be new, replacing the older light bulb models with new LED traffic lights.

“We have gone to the LED lights because they are more energy efficient light,” Moon said. “It only burns about 10 percent of the electricity of the old lights.”

Even though the new cameras on Carter Street won’t take video, that doesn’t mean that motion-capture cameras aren’t coming to Vidalia.

Police Chief Ronnie G. “Tapper” Hendricks said the camera system on the Vidalia Riverfront will be back up and running — and recording, as opposed to just streaming at the police station — next week.

The old camera system, which sent information back to the police department from the riverfront, ran on a 250-gigabyte hard drive. That limited how much information could be stored.

In the system that is currently being installed, two 500 gigabyte hard drives will have the capability of storing six months of video from the riverfront at a time.

After that, the Vidalia Police Department hopes to implement a wireless video system, Hendricks said.

“They may be on Carter Street or anywhere we have troubled areas,” Hendricks said. “The cameras we want to buy are very easily moved. All I would have to do is pick up the phone and call the Vidalia Utility Department and in 30 minutes they would have it where I want it,” he said.