Sustainability Analysis of Urban Transportation Network Based on the Determination of the Relative Importance of Evaluation Criteria

There is rising agreement that transportation systems are perfectly capable of linking economic development, environmental integrity, and social quality of life. Meanwhile a wide range of research clearly shows that transportation systems are unsustainable in most of the cities and urban areas. In practice, there are numerous transportation systems which are able to pose serious threat to the environmental, social and economic aspects of future generations. Therefore, a truly sustainable urban transportation network is definitely one of the most pressing need of cities and urban centers, particularly in developing countries. Thus identifying the evaluation criteria and determining their importance are critical. While most researches have only focused on economic or environmental aspect of transportation systems, in this paper, by considering economic, social and environmental dimensions, the evaluation criteria for evaluating the sustainability of urban transportation network have been discerned. Furthermore, a framework based on a goal programming model for Best Worst Method (BWM) has been proposed to evaluate and prioritize sustainability dimensions and evaluation criteria. In order to demonstrate the utility of the proposed model, it is employed to a real-world case study of transportation in Yazd, one of the most important cities in Iran and the first Iranian historic city. The results of this study are applied to evaluate, prioritize and select real transportation projects. Moreover, it is demonstrated how the proposed framework could assist urban managers in analyzing sustainability of existing instances, formulating effective strategies, evaluating and selecting coherent policies or even constructing projects to accomplish sustainability goals.