A methodology of redesigning and evaluating medium-sized public transportation systems

Abstract

The chapter presents a generic methodology of carrying out a comprehensive redesign of a public transportation system. The proposed paradigm can be applied by municipal authorities (local governments) and management of urban transportation systems to upgrade local transportation. The authors propose two major stages of this methodology: 1. A heuristic construction of the public transportation system redesign variants/scenarios; 2. Multiple criteria evaluation of these scenarios. In the first stage 6 redesign concepts of the public transportation system are developed. The variants are constructed heuristically, based on “common sense”, best practices and authors’ expert knowledge in the field. In the second stage, the evaluation of redesign scenarios is defined as a multiple criteria ranking problem. A consistent family of criteria is defined, preferences of the decision maker (DM) and stakeholders are identified and modeled, and finally computational experiments are performed. In the computational phase selected Multiple Criteria Decision Making/Aiding (MCDM/A) methods, such as: AHP and ELECTRE III/IV are applied. The analysis is carried out based on a real world case study in a medium sized city in Poland. The generated results are compared with the intuitive decisions made by the officers of the local Town Hall.