The Minister for Transport stated yesterday that congestion charges in Dublin are imminent – Paddy Comynwent to the city's traffic control centre to see if they can make a difference
‘THE TRAFFIC this morning was murder.” It was a familiar and accepted excuse as you shuffled past the boss on the way to your desk. And most of the time it was true, too. If it wasn’t the volume on the M50, it was problems at the toll bridge. Or then it was delays in the city centre because of all the trucks on the quays.
However, it’s a Tuesday morning at 8.30am and yours truly has started his journey in Drogheda – having been held up on the M1 briefly, I’ve sailed through the Port Tunnel (even though it cost me my lunch money) and breezed up the Quays and I now sit outside Dublin City Council’s Civic offices on Wood Quay.
It’s unlikely that many of the thousands of commuters who creep towards Dublin from some of the arterial routes would agree that things are getting better, but with barrier-free tolling now a pain-free reality on the M50, the absence of trucks from the city centre and a reduction in the number of private cars entering the city centre every day, there is a chance that we might just have to start to come up with some new excuse for workplace tardiness.
And, as Dublin City Council is keen to point out, the improvements to our city traffic are not just down to good luck. We visited Dublin City Council’s traffic control centre to see just how they keep, or at least attempt to keep, Dublin moving.
Dave Traynor, traffic officer with Dublin City Council whose core responsibility is traffic management, meets us. Softly spoken and with decades of experience behind him, he is in charge of overseeing your daily commute to and from the city centre.
As we enter the main control room, it looks like a cross between a television gantry and NASA control room. There is a wall of television screens and several operators glaring at them, phone in one hand, camera joystick control in the other. There is a representative from Dublin Bus keeping an eye on the buses, a girl from AA Roadwatch relaying traffic information to their offices and, in the corner, a radio presenter for 103.2 Dublin City FM dictates traffic news, between Led Zeppelin and Rihanna songs. It seems like a sort of ordered chaos, with Traynor calmly directing operations.
So how exactly does the traffic management system in Dublin work? “We use Scats (Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System). It’s from Australia and we’ve been using it for about 18 years.
It works by measuring the way cars travel over a sensor on each lane in a junction and, based on the speed of the car, the distance between each car and the number of tyres that go through during [traffic light changes], it works out just how busy the junction is.”
The system figures out how long a car is on a sensor so, if each car spends just a short time on a sensor, it knows that the traffic is moving well – but if each car spends a long time on a sensor and is only slowly replaced by another car then it knows that the traffic is moving slowly and there is congestion.
“It looks at the profile of the traffic operating on each sensor and works out automatically if the right amount of green [light] is being given or not. If the traffic is travelling through very fast, it decides that there might not be as much need for green light time so can reduce it next time and the opposite is true if there is not enough traffic getting through,” says Traynor.
There are places where the traffic lights can vary from between 10 per cent green to 70 per cent green depending on what the system decides, and there are other areas where the amount of green light time is pre-determined as part of a traffic management system such as restricting the amount of time a side-road gets if traffic tends to be light on it.
“We consider the Scats system to be the best system and I can’t really say there are any drawbacks to it. It is probably the most widely-used system in the world. It is constantly updated and there are excellent technical back up services available.” The system is used in Ireland in Waterford, Wexford, Tullamore, Bray, Fingal and Dublin city and there is a proposal to use it in Navan. It is used abroad in Hong Kong, Sydney and Melbourne.
So what traffic changes has Traynor noticed in recent years? “The bus lanes and the public transport facilities changed traffic. There are more people using buses and less people using cars to get into the city. Since 1990 there has been a reduction from 80,000 to about 63,000 cars coming into the city daily. The ban on HGVs has also made a difference. The rush “hour” is longer too – from about 7am to 10.30am – and we have specific morning peak plans to gradually take care of the rush hour.”
From Monday to Friday the City Council use specific light sequences to take care of the arterial routes to keep them clear for buses. For the most part, the Scats system works automatically. The Luas is also controlled by this system and 95 per cent of junctions give priority to the Luas. “The only time we don’t give it priority is when there is a high volume of pedestrians at a particular junction. An important new development will also be to have bus priority integrated into the Scats system and it will be rolled out with real-time passenger information. That is at the planning stage at the moment.”
What this will mean is that a bus passenger at a stop will be able to tell exactly when the bus is due and if it is running late there will be more green traffic light time given,” adds Traynor.
The most fun part of the Traffic Control Centre is, without doubt, watching the traffic on one of the 140 cameras dotted around the city, from right up to the toll bridge in Drogheda and down to the N11 end of the M50.
We did of course, have a go. You can zoom, turn 360 degrees and focus on traffic hotspots in a flash. It is Big Brother, without the minor celebrities.
“We need more people to go on public transport – to use buses, to cycle and to walk,” says Traynor. “There needs to be more integration between public transport and traffic management systems, which we are working on.”
As I leave the offices more aware of how the city’s traffic works, it does strike me that this is a pretty well-oiled machine, limited mainly by the sheer volume of cars entering the city and increasingly less by the roads provided or the systems put in place to keep them clear.
What is clear is that there are too few drivers that are either willing or able to use public transport as a solution and with it looking likely that there will be further cuts in spending and employment in this area, there might not a realistic chance of changing things any time soon.