Bet on Cars Passing: counting vehicles through a live zone

Everything on this page follows from a single rule: the count registers a crossing of the zone boundary, not the presence of a vehicle in the frame. The detection zone is a rectangle drawn on the camera picture. A computer vision model tracks each object and adds one to the count at the moment its path passes over the edge of that rectangle. A car that is visible for the whole round but never touches the boundary is worth nothing. A car that enters the zone at the last second is worth exactly one.

This is why a vehicle stopped inside the zone at a red light does not move the number. It sat there, it was filmed, it was tracked, but it did not cross a line, so the counter stays where it was. Only when the signal changes and the queue starts rolling across the boundary does the count begin to climb, one crossing per vehicle.

The consequence almost nobody explains: a dense jam can produce a lower count than free-flowing traffic. A jam is a lot of vehicles moving very little, and a count is about movement across a line. A street where twenty cars roll through the zone one after another beats a street where forty cars stand bumper to bumper waiting for green. Crowded footage looks like a high number and often settles as a low one.

Four markets on that count. Under, Over, Range and Exact are the only things you can back. There is no market on the colour of a car, on a specific lane or on whether the light changes.

Betting on cars through an intersection and betting on an open stretch use the same rule and produce different shapes of result. At a junction the flow is portioned. The signal cycle holds vehicles, then releases them, so the zone sees a platoon of crossings followed by a gap. A 55-second window can swallow one full release, parts of two, or a long red with a trickle from a side street, and the count jumps accordingly.

On an open section there is no gate. Vehicles arrive roughly as they left the previous junction, spread out by distance and speed, and the zone registers a steadier drip of crossings. The total over a round is less lumpy, and two consecutive rounds on the same open road tend to look more alike than two consecutive rounds at a signalised crossing. The junction's number is not higher or lower on average; it is more spread out around its own middle.

The signal cycle therefore decides when vehicles cross, and the round clock decides which part of that cycle you are betting on. Neither is visible in the odds, because the operator prices the feed, not the phase. Timing a bet to the light is a subject for our betting on traffic cameras page, where the zone geometry and the tracker's behaviour at a stop line are laid out in detail; here it is enough to know that the shape of the distribution is the junction's doing.

Under and Over work like a total in sports. The operator sets a line for the feed, for example 34 on a busy afternoon camera, and you back the count finishing below or above it. Each side prices close to even money, and the margin is taken out of both prices, which is where the 90.00–92.16 % band comes from.

Range asks for the count to land in a band around the line, a few numbers wide. It hits less often than one side of a total, because the band covers less of the distribution than a whole half, and it pays correspondingly more. Exact is one number. It carries the highest payout on the board and the lowest frequency by a wide margin.

The common mistake is treating Exact as a cheap lottery ticket. One Exact at a small stake looks harmless; the problem is the clock. At about 55 seconds a round, roughly 65 rounds pass in an hour, and an hour of "one quick Exact per round" is 65 bets at the lowest hit rate on the menu. The arithmetic of that, and the limit tools that keep it in check, are on our stakes and limits page.

Lines are set per feed and per round by the operator; the payouts below are illustrative at a 91 % return, in the middle of the published band. For the wider Rush Hour line-up and its neighbouring titles see car betting game.