Evaluating the Factors Affecting the Selection of Sustainable Public Transport System based on an Integrated AHP and Fuzzy TOPSIS Approach

In the current era, sustainability has become a vital part of discussion for the decision makers of modern transportation system, thus introducing the concept of sustainable transportation. The COVID-19 crisis brought forth prominent structural fault-lines persisting in the prevalent global transportation model. Transportation being the primary carrier, was brought to a standstill because of lockdowns imposed by various nations, which had cut the entire world’s daily carbon emission by 17%. But soon after the countries eased down their industries and operations, the gas level rose up to normal. This is thus the perfect time for developing countries like India to come up with the most sustainable transportation systems that can be sustainable while helping the public maintain the social distancing norms that is now the utmost priority of citizens to avoid any further infection from the virus; while simultaneously subsiding wide-scale negative externalities with respect to their pollution, degradation and social impact quotients, beyond their economic and operational inefficiencies. 21st century business models such as ride sharing, vehicle aggregators, park and ride, multi-model transport did seem beneficial in furthering the objective of this study. This study aims to identify and analyse the various factors affecting the selection of sustainable public transportation system in the city of Ahmedabad using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and identify the most sustainable transportation system from the four alternative transportation systems using Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS). The 16 identified factors were categorized into 5 groups out of which Economic factors were found to be the most influencing factors