Assessing and ranking the potential of a street to be redesigned as a Complete Street: A multi-criteria decision aiding approach

Abstract

In order to increase the sustainability of transportation in cities, streets must provide infrastructures that favor active and public transportation modes. However, the current decision-making processes in transportation projects do not always explicitly take into account sustainable transportation requirements and often ignore concerns that may arise in other fields such as environmental protection, health, or urban design. The proposed framework in this paper aims at integrating sustainability in a decision-making process by creating better collaboration and communication between professionals of such disparate fields. The framework is based on group workshops, problem structuring, multi-criteria decision aiding and geographic information systems. It was applied in Quebec City, Canada. The objective of the workshops was to identify higher priority streets that should be redesigned as Complete Streets, a popular movement that advocates “streets for everyone” in North America. To facilitate communication and use for future decisions, the results of the analysis were integrated and presented in a geographic information system. As a result, this user-friendly tool is currently used to support decision-making by Quebec City officials who must choose the streets to be redesigned as Complete Streets while ensuring transparency and traceability. Such an approach may better support policies to make the transport system more sustainable by integrating various considerations, being transparent and improving communication of the outcome.