Sustainable Urban Transport Development with Stakeholder Participation, an AHP-Kendall Model: A Case Study for Mersin

Szabolcs Duleba,Sarbast Moslem

doi:10.3390/su10103647

Abstract

Public transport development decisions are generally made by local government representatives or managers of the local transport company through a top-down procedure. However, if the implications do not meet the demand of the public, the improvement cannot be considered as sustainable and in a long range, correction is necessary. This paper aims to introduce a new model which is capable of supporting public transport development decision making by examining the preferences of different stakeholder groups (passengers, potential passengers, and local government) and creating an acceptable coordination for an ultimate, sustainable decision. In the model, Analytic Hierarchy Process is applied, combined with Kendall rank correlation and an extra level of stakeholder significance in the decision. A case study is also presented on the situation of a Turkish city: Mersin. The results show, that by the application of the new model, a more integrated and thus more sustainable solution can be created for the public transport problems of the city, and by this, probably more citizens can be attracted to use public transport modes which might result in decreased CO2 emissions.

Highlights

In recent years, it has become well-known that sustainable local development decisions may only be made by considering the interests of different stakeholder groups [1]
Such public transport system improvement can be successful in the long term, which integrates the needs of these different groups; in case one or more are violated, the impact will not be as expected by the decision makers [2]
The selected Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has the advantage of providing a comprehensive decision structure to the evaluators and checking the consistency of the responses that are inevitable in the case of layman evaluators

Summary

Introduction

It has become well-known that sustainable local development decisions may only be made by considering the interests of different stakeholder groups [1] This refers to urban transport service development, in which three main stakeholder participants can be identified: Passengers, potential passengers (citizens using other type of transport yet), and local government. Government representatives and experts may consider cost and technical issues [4], while the users and potential users of public transport (in the paper the term: non-passenger will be applied for this group) as consumers of the public service may have more subjective opinions [5]—based on their perceptions of the journey It is advisable for all public service development projects, to examine the conflict among the needs of the involved groups before launching the implications. Measuring the gaps among the requirements is a powerful tool in decision making and the first step for coordinating the conflicts in case of large discrepancy

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion