Public Involvement in Transportation Decision Making: A Comparison between Baghdad and Tehran

This study develops an integrated methodology to incorporate public perspectives into the establishment and development of public transportation infrastructure systems. The approach involves surveying citizens to collect data, performing demographic analyses to identify differences between cities, and applying Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques to weight, scale, and integrate evaluation criteria in order to determine the optimal transportation option. The primary aim of this research is to incorporate public perspectives into transportation planning in developing countries and to promote stakeholder engagement for transportation initiatives in cities such as Baghdad, Iraq, and Tehran, Iran. First, an initial survey was conducted to identify the top three preferred criteria among 200 participants from both cities. The survey results revealed that the three most important criteria were safety, travel time, and reliability. Subsequently, a larger survey utilizing the Saaty scale was administered to capture citizens' preferences, with a total sample size of 550 from Baghdad and 345 from Tehran. The weights of the criteria were then calculated using the Group Analytical Hierarchy Process (GAHP). Three transportation alternatives-monorail, Light Rapid Transit (LRT), and metrobus-were suggested by transportation experts to be evaluated and ranked using the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) based on the weighted citizen preferences. The results indicate that for Baghdad residents, transportation safety is the most important priority, followed by reliability and travel time. However, LRT is rated as the most optimal transportation solution (0.721), followed by monorail (0.596) and metrobus (0.078). In Tehran, travel time represents the most preferred transportation attribute, followed by reliability and safety. The residents of Tehran are shown to prefer LRT (0.843), followed by monorail (0.370) and metrobus (0.143). Despite the similar ranking of transportation alternatives in the two cities, the performance scores differ between them, highlighting the importance of tailoring transportation planning to the unique preferences and needs of local communities. The validation of the results was conducted through sensitivity analysis to determine how variations in the criteria weights and input parameters affected the final rankings. Additionally, a stated preference survey was employed as a practical method to evaluate the robustness of the final ranking of the alternatives.