Evaluating sustainability of urban mobility of Asian cities: An integrated approach of interval type-2 fuzzy best-worst method and MULTIMOORA

Abstract

The motivation for sustainable urban mobility is driven by the need to create environmentally friendly, socially inclusive, economically viable, and healthier cities for current and future generations. It requires a comprehensive approach that combines infrastructure development, policy changes, behavioral shifts, and technological advancements to transform urban transportation systems. The importance of creating increasingly sustainable urban transportation is now greater than it has ever been. One of the attempts in this field is the sustainable urban transport index (SUTI) developed by the United Nations (UN). Although the SUTI has a comprehensive pool of criteria for the evaluation of mobility sustainability of cities, considering the criteria weights as equal and disregarding the uncertainties present in expert opinions is viewed as a significant drawback. To satisfy the aforementioned deficiency, a novel integrated approach including the best-worst method (BWM), multi-objective optimization by ratio analysis (MOORA) and MOORA plus full multiplicative form (MULTIMOORA) method is develloped and applied for the SUTI evaluation. In order to manage ambiguous linguistic approximations, the utilization of BWM is applied within the framework of interval type-2 fuzzy (IT2F) sets. While IT2F-BWM is used to prioritize the main and sub-indicators of SUTI, MULTIMOORA approach is applied to rank the Asian cities. The findings imply that the proposed approach not only provides a more scientific perspective but also provides the opportunity to perform sensitivity analysis on criteria weights. Therefore, the results obtained in this study are expected to help cities to create a road map for planning sustainable urban mobility (e.g. Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan).