South Dublin County Council has been keeping a beady eye on motorists, with 28 automatic cameras on the N4, N7 and N81 snapping their registration plates to find out where they're coming from and going to every day.
Long in advance of the introduction of electronic tolling, which could also use "automatic number plate recognition" cameras, the council is using the data it collects as a real-time origin and destination study of traffic crossing its boundaries.
"We take the number, match it with the Department of the Environment computer records of car registrations, analyse the data and then delete it," county manager Joe Horan told The Irish Times.
"We don't hold on to names or addresses."
As he pointed out, the more traditional origin and destination studies of traffic are "snapshots in time", with the data fed into the Dublin Transportation Office's computer to assist with modelling future needs - particularly for public transport.
South Dublin County Council has its eye on that too. It has applied for a licence to provide bus services across its administrative area, to serve motorists leaving their cars at park-and-ride sites and taking them to and from the city centre.
"We're starting with a site at the Leixlip interchange on the N4," Mr Horan said. "We're also examining the possibility of providing green cycle routes through parks and along the banks to the Grand Canal to separate cyclists from the traffic." He noted that 135 schools are located in south Dublin, as well as the Institute of Technology, Tallaght.
"Altogether, we have 40,000 students. And if we provided more cycle facilities for them, it would have a real impact on school mobility."
With 6,000 businesses in the area, traffic movement is complex. "We wanted to find out how people are moving around. The cameras pick up motorists as they enter south Dublin and exit from it, as the case may be, on our three main radial routes."
The cameras are also tracking how long it takes buses to move through the area, with a view to providing more bus lanes and quality bus corridors (QBCs). "Our aim is to improve the lot of bus services, including private buses," Mr Horan said.
The processing and dissemination of data collected by the cameras would also be of value to logistics planners in the road freight sector, as it would allow them to estimate journey times on alternative routes so as to avoid getting caught in gridlock.
Links are provided to AA Roadwatch, LiveDrive Radio, Dublin City Council, the National Roads Authority and the Dublin Transportation Office giving instant access to journey time information. A text messaging service is also being developed.
The initiative arose from a EU Intelligent Transportation Systems project in which the council's partners are Nantes (France), Cologne (Germany), The Hague (Netherlands) and the Greater Manchester Public Transport Executive, which is leading it.
