Evaluation of Park-and-Ride Application with AHP and ANP Methods for the City of Eskisehir, Turkey

Abstract

Urban plans that will shape the city's future should include sustainable transportation systems so that it becomes a livable city. Today, delimiting individual transportation and increasing the share of mass transit play an essential role in planning a sustainable urban transportation system. Several practices can be utilized for attracting private car users into public transportation. Among these practices, park-and-ride application precedes because it provides significant benefits in sustainable transport. Therefore, city planning should be considered together with parking lot areas. In this evaluation, it would be more appropriate to use multiple-criteria decision methods (MCDMs) such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and analytical network process (ANP) instead of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) that focuses only on costs and revenues. Therefore, it is not accurate to evaluate the park-and-ride application in cities only according to the monetized criteria by CBA, because there are severe problems in monetizing negativities such as traffic congestion, loss of time, and harmful environmental effects arising from the city's structure. For this reason, it was thought that it would be more accurate to make a multiple-criteria evaluation with methods such as AHP and ANP for the park-and-ride application. In addition, using multiple criteria decision-making methods will positively increase the effects of urban planning on the city. In this direction, a new approach to the subject is presented in our study. In this study, the park-and-ride system and other applicable scenarios have been evaluated in the city of Eskisehir with both AHP and ANP methods by taking expert views. In this respect, the study shows differences from the previous studies on this subject. The alternatives evaluated in the study comprise the Protection of the Current Situation, the Introduction of Only Restrictive Factors, and the Park-and-Ride Implementation. As a result, in applying both methods, the overall relative priority values of alternatives were calculated and found to be the highest in the case of Park-and-Ride Implementation. Therefore, the park-and-ride application came forward in both methods. In this regard, the results obtained are consistent. From this study, it was determined that the park-and-ride application ensured a clear superiority compared with other alternatives. This study provides a general framework for the park-and-ride application in medium-sized cities whose centers are congested and attract many passengers in developing countries. Although it seems that an application has been made for the city of Eskisehir, the study also contains general characteristics.