Highway Transportation, Health, and Social Equity: A Delphi-ANP Approach to Sustainable Transport Planning

Abstract

It has become standard practice for governments and transportation engineers around the world to infuse sustainability principles into their plans as higher-level goals and priorities, with indicators to reflect the same. The transformation towards sustainable mobility should involve the three interconnected pillars of sustainable development: environment, social equity, and economy. These pillars, known in the business field as the ‘triple-bottom-line’, require specific indicators that can be used to measure the attainment of each pillar. There is evidence that the social equity impacts of construction projects, such as transport projects, and their distributional effects across various segments of society have traditionally been viewed as secondary or subsidiary concerns relative to their economic and environmental impacts. Recognizing the relative relegation in both academic and policy circles of social impacts and the ‘weak’ tools to identify such impacts, this research aims to employ a hybrid decision method based on the analytic network process and Delphi method to identify the major adverse impacts of highway automobiles on health and social equity in the UAE. In doing so, governments will be better positioned to mitigate adverse impacts through engineering, urban planning, technological, and other appropriate initiatives. Throughout the Delphi process, 15 health and social equity indicators have been validated by experts in the field of sustainability and transportation through an iterative process. Then, experts in the same field were chosen to develop and validate the ANP model based on the validated indicators through pairwise comparison questionnaires. The results and findings revealed that the experts’ judgment preferences are consistent (inconsistency value less than 0.1), wherein the highest priority is the ‘Safety’ indicator, and the lowest priority is the ‘Public participation in transport decision’ indicator.