Developing Context Sensitive Planning Criteria for Transit Oriented Development (TOD): A Fuzzy-Group Decision Approach

Abstract

Developing countries like India have started focusing on Transit Oriented Development (TOD) policies for their existing cities. In the absence of a generic definition and generalized criteria in the TOD literature, context-specific planning criteria are essentially required to assess TOD suitability in any city. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques have been widely used throughout the past studies to assist multi-stakeholders’ in establishing criteria related to TOD planning. This paper presents a Multi-Criteria Multi-Stakeholder Decision Making approach based on Fuzzy-Analytical Hierarchical Process (FAHP) to establish planning criteria which can be further useful to select suitable TOD sites in Delhi, India. A series of 9 criteria and their corresponding indicators are established based on literature review and expert consultation. Three stakeholder groups (researchers, planners, and policymakers) comprising of 31 experts from different fields related to TOD issues were solicited to provide their perspectives on TOD planning in the Delhi city. The expert judgments were converted into fuzzy numbers to capture the vagueness and uncertainty that human attitudes entail when making judgments. In this study, 13 priority indicators were identified based on a balanced consensus in stakeholder groups using the FAHP method. Given that the stakeholder groups diverge in their perspectives, their judgments convergence in believing that TOD planning in Delhi can be best assessed using ‘transit service’ criterion and least assessed using ‘Demographics’ criterion. The study has drawn global weights of criterion and indicators from multi-stakeholders’ perspectives can be effective in achieving TOD planning across existing and future cities in India.