Assessing sustainability indicators of public transportation using PAHP

Sustainable public transport is vital for cities' growth and development. Enhancing public transit will boost demand, ensure balanced sustainability, satisfy users and operators, and help achieve sustainability goals. This requires finding a general framework to determine the priorities that accomplish the goal of sustainability and integration of the transportation system. To evaluate this complex problem, this study used the new technique of Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), which is the Parsimonious Analytical Hierarchy Process (PAHP) and the traditional Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in two stages to streamline. The main objective of applying PAHP in the decision-making process is to reduce the number of pairwise comparisons required and prioritize 44 comprehensive indicators of the essential dimensions of sustainability in public transportation. This makes PAHP particularly efficient and less cognitively demanding for experts while still providing robust and reliable prioritization of criteria. The findings highlight that travel time, ticket prices, emissions, and traffic management are the most critical social, economic, environmental, and technical indicators. This approach streamlines evaluation and offers policymakers a clear roadmap for prioritizing sustainability measures in public transit. The implications of this work suggest that future development efforts should focus on enhancing these prioritized indicators to achieve a more sustainable public transportation system.