Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Framework for Determining Public Microtransit Service Zones

The paper addresses a critical research gap in the literature by focusing on the identification of service areas for microtransit. It presents a framework for identifying areas where microtransit would have a higher potential for success. The primary objective is to assist agencies in their efforts to provide microtransit services by offering a robust and flexible decision-making framework. This framework serves as an intermediate step between an initial planning study that identifies candidate zones and a detailed feasibility study, which is currently missing in the literature. The framework is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) process that can be applicable to various contexts. Specifically, our approach utilizes a lexicographic decision rule for ranking microtransit service priority measures for each census block of a selected region, such as a county. We employ two composite measures for ranking: Microtransit Propensity Index (MPI) and Weighted Accessibility Score (WAS). The latter combines transit access to work and to eight points of interest (POIs). This framework can be adapted to identify zones suitable for microtransit service based on different objectives, such as connecting residents to transit centers, providing first- and last-mile connections, providing services in transit deserts, providing flexible transit service to low-income communities, or providing access to the POIs within a zone. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated using the case of Prince George's County in Maryland. The results reveal that our approach provides greater insights into the feasibility of an area for microtransit compared with relying solely on a single index such as MPI.