An Innovative Approach to Assess Sustainability of Urban Mobility—Using Fuzzy MCDM Method

Abstract

Urban mobility is one of the toughest challenges faced by the cities in the developing world and mobility is a key dynamic of urbanization. Cities have been major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and personal transport dependencies have been a concern. Government at federal level and state level have been trying to put in place a robust mobility system to control this menace. Without a proper performance measurement of urban mobility, it is difficult to identify and solve these problems. Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India have adopted a framework to benchmark cities designing a set of Service Level Benchmarks and aggregate them to find out an Index. In this paper, an attempt has been made to deliberate on creating a performance measurement framework for Urban Mobility Index (UMI) using a Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approach. A comparison of both the approach has been made by analyzing the UMI for 12 Indian cities. The paper identifies certain indicators which measure the sustainability as well as smartness of a city from the perspective of Urban Mobility. These indicators and the UMI can be used to asses the progress on city performance and corrective actions could be taken.