Traffic demand management for Dublin's congested streets is part of the package of measures currently being implemented to offset the imbalance between transport demand and supply. Demand management seeks to reduce the growth in travel while maintaining economic progress and is designed to encourage a transfer of trips, especially during peak periods, from the private car to sustainable modes of transport (DTO, 2000). There are a number of established forms of road user pricing including cordon charging, area licensing, screen-line tolling and pricing by time or distance. This paper evaluates the impact of a series of cordon road use pricing scenarios using a newly developed parallelised version of SATURN that runs on parallel processors. The paper is laid out in six sections. Section two describes the developments that have led to the present situation in the greater Dublin area (GDA). Section three describes the methodologies used to assess the different cordon road use pricing scenarios. Section four looks at the tests that have been completed and discusses the results from these tests while sections five and six describe future research and conclusions respectively. The analysis evaluates both the city-wide and local impacts of road use pricing cordon scenarios on the GDA network. Variables examined include travel time, travel distance, queue lengths and transfer to other modes. The output of the research will be a comprehensive set of results from a series of model runs for the evaluation of road use pricing in Dublin.
Abstract