Multidimensional Assessment of Developing an Urban Public Transit Metropolis in China

Abstract

This paper presents a multidimensional framework to evaluate, monitor, and compare the development of public transportation systems towards Transit Metropolis status in different cities in China. In the proposed framework, a policy level is designed to better capture a city’s characteristics and developing priorities as well as the subjective opinions of various transit stakeholders, based on which technical criteria are further compared and assessed in the technical level with an enhanced fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) model, where a nonlinear optimization formulation is proposed to maximize the consistency in pairwise comparison and weight estimation. The proposed framework offers the advantage of preventing the vagueness and uncertainty of decision-maker(s) when evaluating technical criteria while properly retaining the policy preferences from decision-makers. A case study of nine cities in the Chongqing metropolitan area, China, reveal that the proposed model can effectively evaluate the performance of public transportation system development at different levels of detail. It can be used to generate the rankings of different cities and also to identify deficiencies and areas of improvement.