1. A method for tracking and characterizing a plurality of vehicles simultaneously in a traffic control environment, the method comprising: providing a 3D optical emitter at an installation height oriented to allow illumination of a 3D detection zone in said environment; providing a 3D optical receiver oriented to have a wide and deep field of view within said 3D detection zone, said 3D optical receiver having a plurality of detection channels in said field of view; driving the 3D optical emitter into emitting short light pulses toward the detection zone, said light pulses having an emitted light waveform; receiving a reflection/backscatter of the emitted light on the vehicles in the 3D detection zone at said 3D optical receiver, thereby acquiring an individual digital full-waveform LIDAR trace for each detection channel of said 3D optical receiver; using said individual digital full-waveform LIDAR trace and said emitted light waveform, detecting a presence of a plurality of vehicles in said 3D detection zone, a position of at least part of each said vehicle in said 3D detection zone and a time at which said position is detected; assigning a unique identifier to each vehicle of said plurality of vehicles detected; repeating said steps of driving, receiving, acquiring and detecting, at a predetermined frequency; at each instance of said repeating step, tracking and recording an updated position of each vehicle of said plurality of vehicles detected and an updated time at which said updated position is detected, with said unique identifier; wherein said detecting said presence includes: extracting observations in the individual digital full-waveform LIDAR trace; using the location for the observations to remove observations coming from a surrounding environment; extracting lines using an estimate line and a covariance matrix using polar coordinates; removing observations located on lines parallel to the x axis.