Sustainable development solutions of public transportation:An integrated IMF SWARA and Fuzzy Bonferroni operator

Abstract

Developing the quality of public transport has an efficient impact to attract more users to switch modes from private vehicles to public transport, which has a tremendous capability in reducing the traffic congestion, noise and CO2 emissions the urban areas. For this reason, policy makers and scholars aim to enhance the supply quality of public transport system, where involving citizens along with experts and decision makers in the decision process will reflect the existed and future demand to provide more sustainable solutions which provide efficient solutions to achieve positive impacts on the local environment. This study intends to determine the preference of decision-makers and operators for the importance of the supply quality elements of urban bus transport services in Mersin city, Turkey. For this aim, decision makers and experts are involved in the evaluation process to provide feedback on public transport quality with the view of increasing the satisfaction and thus usage, with positive impacts on increased public transport modal share and dropped CO2 emission transport. In total we have formed list of three main criteria: transport quality, service quality and traceability which contains in total 21 sub-criteria. For determining all criteria weights we have formed in total 112 models using IMF SWARA (Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis) method and for final determining criteria weights Fuzzy Bonferroni operator (FBO) has been used. Applying such model we have ensured stability in final values of criteria and have obtained optimal results based on preferences decision makers. The adopted results show that the most significant attribute in the system is the “Traceability” with highest weight score (0.398), followed by the “Transport quality” with weight score (0.334), however, the service quality rank as the last significant attribute with weight score (0.264). The originality of our work is conducting IMF SWARA method for improving the service quality of the public transport system.