News

Dublin, 28 August 2008; With West link toll bridge on the verge of switching to barrier free tolling, recent research by Mapflow has revealed that Irelands busiest motorway takes on average 19 minutes to navigate between Junction 5 (Finglas exit) and Junction 9 (Naas Road exit), in either direction. Since early August Mapflow has been collecting journey time data on the M50 - by driving ‘probe’ vehicles between the junctions during morning and evening rush-hour peaks. At any time Mapflow has up to 2 probe vehicles on the M50, one driving Northbound and one driving Southbound.

Some interesting findings include that those heading Southbound were treated to a shorter journey time by an average of five minutes. Heading Northbound the slowest kilometre tended to be between the Galway exit and the toll bridge, taking on average five minutes. Where to make up the lost time? The best opportunity would be just approaching the Finglas exit where a kilometre would take less than one minute on average.

Mapflow’s CEO Richard Bryce commented “Since the West Link opened in 1990 it has been subject to much debate ranging from toll rises to long traffic delays. The recent decision to introduce barrier free tolling is equally controversial and the aim of this research is to measure time delays before and after the introduction of the new system and measure the efficiency of the approach”.

Mapflow, who works with both public and private sector organisations concerned with the road infrastructure, installed GPS devices into each of their probe vehicles and then measured the time to travel every 100 metre road segment along the M50. This gave a unique insight into journey patterns on the M50, where the main congestion points are and how traffic conditions vary between Northbound and Southbound journeys.

Mapflow will also measure journey times throughout September to help understand how long the same journeys are taking after the changeover to free flow tolling. For those of you who were unfortunate to experience it the slowest recorded journey was on August 12 when it took the 54 minutes to travel the 11km between the Naas Road and Finglas exits, which is almost twice as long as the average journey for that time of day.

For more information please visit www.mapflow.com.

For access to an extended set of reports including detailed analysis of M50 journey times for each day surveyed, please contact transport@mapflow.com or telephone phone 01-6341430 and ask for Jonathan Guard.

For press enquiries please contact:

Brian Hamilton at Slattery Communications on 086-3677643
Brian.hamilton@scomms.ie

About Mapflow

Mapflow works with public and private sector organisations responsible concerned with our road infrastructure; we help such organisations to free up congestion, reduce fatal accidents and improve the environment.

We do this by developing technology, knowledge and expertise related to the utilisation of GPS, GIS (mapping) and communications technologies within transportation solutions.

We work with our clients to design and implement solutions in the following areas:
• Road safety including intelligent speed adaptation;
• Capacity planning, journey time monitoring and traffic flow monitoring;
• Road pricing, such as congestion charging and other distance based pricing schemes;
• Value added service delivery such as traffic alerts, event alerts, real time passenger information;
• Rescue and recovery.
For more information please visit www.mapflow.com.