Air pollution is becoming a very important issue for the transportation sector, particularly car emissions in urban areas, and there is much interest in evaluating the actual level of emissions. In this paper, a case study of a standard driving cycle in the urban area of Dublin City is presented. On-road, speed-time data was extracted by an on-board diagnostic tool, and saved into a data acquisition package. Firstly, the driving cycle was established for the urban area of the city; one car travelling different routes has been employed to implement this research and some representative results have been achieved. The second part of the project was to estimate the emissions from the same car using the driving cycle obtained and compare the results with those obtained by a gas analyzer attached to the car simultaneously in order to validate the methodology used in this paper. A representative driving cycle reflecting the real-world driving conditions is proposed and estimated vehicle emissions were compared with measured results. The method is easy to follow and the results are in a good fit to the estimated values. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.