Sustainability versus stakeholder preferences: Searching for synergies in urban and regional mobility measures

Abstract

Public participation is becoming more and more important in transport planning and decision-making. However, the concept of sustainable mobility can be understood in different ways by the stakeholders and the current practice of participation is often limited. This paper presents a framework which makes it possible to evaluate, compare and understand the ranking of the alternatives for small-scale urban and regional mobility projects, assessed on sustainability and stakeholder preferences. We apply rank correlation to detect synergies in evaluation outcomes, in order to understand if there is concordance between the rankings. We also analyse if the stakeholder preferences, calculated by the multi-actor, multi-criteria analysis (MAMCA) were similar to the sustainability assessment by multi-criteria analysis (MCA). The results of the application of the framework on three demonstration projects indicate that most stakeholders have similar preferences compared to the project alternatives' ranking of sustainability and that any of the interventions would be more sustainable compared to the business as usual.