Prioritizing Transit Markets Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

Abstract

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a multicriteria decision‐making approach that can be used to allocate scarce resources. Although there has been an extensive application of AHP in many disciplines, very little is reported in the literature on the use of AHP as a decision‐making tool in the field of transportation. The application of AHP in ranking transit privatization projects in the Detroit metropolitan area is demonstrated in this paper. Also, these rankings are compared with those obtained by using the traditional scoring and scaling technique in an earlier study. The paper shows that AHP is a viable tool for rank ordering a large number of transportation projects following various weighting schemes. These rankings are compatible with those obtained by scaling techniques; however, there appears to be a difference between rankings obtained by AHP and those obtained by scoring.