Sustainability evaluation methods for public transport with a focus on Latin American cities: A literature review

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Stakeholders worldwide commit to the goal of sustainable development and transport, and to the promotion of public transport (PT) as one backbone of sustainable transport. Evaluation frameworks have been developed to aid municipalities and operators in purposefully shaping their PT systems. These frameworks differ greatly in their scope and consideration of the different sustainability dimensions, and in addition, they focus on industrialized countries. The goal of this study is to provide a systematic overview of existing frameworks for evaluating the sustainability of PT systems with a particular focus on Latin America for the first time, to identify possible gaps that result from the specific characteristics of Latin American PT systems and finally to derive research needs and recommendations for this region. The analysis includes three types of articles: scientific papers, international guidelines published by NGOs, and local as well as national Latin American guidelines for PT evaluation. The 69 identified relevant references reveal that Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM), followed by Assessment Indicator Models (AIM) are the preferred evaluation frameworks. Among the MCDM methods, the Analytical Hierarchy Process was the most frequently approach. We found a high prevalence of studies taking society and municipalities’ perspective (both 46%), followed by combinations (users, operators, municipalities − 37%), and the users’ perspective (14%). The review further shows that the Latin American context is not sufficiently considered in the existing frameworks and that further research is needed to develop frameworks that comprehensively and systematically consider all sustainability dimensions for this specific spatial context.