The Dublin Transportation Office (DTO) is a government agency which provides transport and land use advice to organisations operating in the Greater Dublin Area.
Cora Systems
Introduction
The Dublin Transportation Office is a government agency which provides transport and land use advice to organisations operating in the Greater Dublin Area
Client
The Dublin Transportation Office is a government agency which provides transport and land use advice to organisations operating in the Greater Dublin Area. The Office was formed in 1995 to coordinate the implementation by the relevant agencies of an agreed integrated transport strategy for the area. The DTO makes a continuous input to transportation planning and land use policy through a team of engineers, planners, and GIS professionals who specialise in Transportation Planning, Transportation Modeling, Traffic Management and Land Use Planning.
Challenge
The ongoing challenge for DTO is how to provide transport and land use advice that is based on informed decision making, using whatever tools at its’ disposal to maximum effect.
Solution
The DTO is an active user of ArcGIS, using it to manage, visualise and analyse an extensive database of spatial information the Office has at its disposal. This includes demographic and travel data from the CSO, the Geodirectory, Local Authority Development Plans and Planning Registers as well as of course the network data concerning road, rail, bus and cycle networks.
Benefits
Using ArcGIS the DTO is developing a model to assess journey times within the Greater Dublin Area. Journey time modeling works out how accessible any given centre is on the basis of total journey time using various public transport modes.
The resulting map shows graphically how accessible the modeled destination is from each origin. This information is of huge social benefit, it helps transport planners optimise their networks to provide the best journey times to popular destinations. It can also be used to determine where best to place public facilities to maximise their accessibility via the public transport network.
Technology Used
The DTO have used ArcGIS Desktop and the Network Analyst Extension to to determine the least cost (in terms of time) to reach a set of destinations from a selected number of origins. This journey time model runs against the bus and rail transport networks taking into account bus, LUAS and even walk times to evaluate the impact of the introduction of new LUAS stops on journey times.
A result from the model is depicted below. This is from a presentation to GIS Ireland 2009 by John Nott of the DTO; it shows the accessibility of Dundrum Town Centre by public transport, the effect of the LUAS Green Line can clearly be seen to increase accessibility along a linear corridor from St Stephens Green to Dundrum.