Comprehensive evaluation of new urban transportation systems by AHP

Abstract

Many different kinds of transportation systems such as ‘group rapid transit’, etc., have recently been presented as ideal urban public transportation systems. When planning to introduce such a new transportation system into a city, it is necessary to select the most desirable system for that city from those that have been proposed. The comprehensive evaluation of transportation systems must reflect various aspects such as the costs of construction and maintenance and the viewpoints or both the system users and the local inhabitants. This makes it one of the most difficult and yet vitally important problems in public transportation planning. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) developed by T. L Saaty is straightforward and has the feature that it can deal with both qualitative and quantitative factors at the same time, and it is suitable for applying to complex evaluation problems, In this paper, three transportation systems are proposed for one of the newly planned towns in Kansai Cultural and Academic Research Complexes, and a comprehensive evaluation of these systems is performed by applying the AHP. It has been proved through the process of evaluation that information which is very useful in reaching a consensus for choosing a system can be obtained.