The facts
Project Location: Limerick, Ireland
Client: Direct Route Consortium (Sisk,
Roadbridge, Lagan Holdings)
Start Date: March 2005
Completion Date: June 2006
Procurement method: Direct
Project Construction Value: 660 million
euro
Services provided: Traffic and Revenue
Forecasts
The project
Capita Symonds was selected for the
role of Traffic Advisor by the Direct Route Consortium, in support
of their bid for this new €660 million PPP Tolled River
Crossing.
The project is part of NRA’s planned strategic
network upgrades and will be built, maintained and operated by the
concessionaire. In addition to the construction of a new tunnel
under the river Shannon, the project will involve the construction
of 11km (approximately) of dual-carriageway resulting in the
completion of Limerick’s Southern Bypass.
Capita Symonds’ study was aimed at providing
Direct Route with robust traffic forecasts for the new crossing,
for the duration of the concession period. The three existing river
crossings within the City of Limerick are frequently congested and
the main purpose of the study was to estimate the likely traffic
diversion that could be attained by the new route.
As part of this study, we undertook extensive
data collection and analysis exercises, including traffic counts,
Origin-Destination and journey time surveys. Fundamental issues
such as the estimation of sensible Values of Time and
willingness-to-pay constituted a crucial part of this study. The
forecasts were produced for different vehicle classes by
integrating SATURN and Excel-based traffic models. The latter were
developed with the main intention to carry out Traffic Risk
Analysis on a number of key variables.