Wireless sensor networks have grown significant attentions among researchers for providing a flexible and low-cost framework to design an architecture for Intelligent Transport Systems. The inherent challenges in distribution and management of sensor networks along the road require an application-specific protocol support for the network connectivity, the sensing coverage, the reliable data forwarding, and the network lifetime improvement. This paper introduces the concept of k-strip length coverage along the road, which ensures a better sensing coverage for the detection of moving vehicles compared with the conventional barrier coverage and full area coverage, in terms of the availability of sufficient information for statistical processing and the number of sensors required to be active. To extend the network lifetime, every sensor follows a sleep-wakeup schedule maintaining the network connectivity and the k-strip length coverage. This scheduling problem is modeled as a graph optimization, the NP-hardness of which motivates to design a centralized heuristic, providing an approximate solution. As a sensor network is inherently distributed in nature, properties of the centralized heuristic are explored to design a per-node solution based on local information. Performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed through simulation results. © 2000-2011 IEEE.