Attribute Assessment for Sustainable Transportation Planning for Metropolitan Cities: A Fuzzy Approach

The fast growth of ‘surrounding regions’ often termed as ‘sprawl’ of metropolitan cities is a matter of concern for all the concerned planning authorities. This haphazard development directly implies multitude of social, economic and environmental repercussion (Theobald 2001). With an extension of city limits, these areas get included in the city, the fringes of the cities keep moving outwards, new nucleus are formed, new flow paths for people and goods are established. Success and sustainability of transportation planning here depend upon many important attributes like availability of adequate road network, transit nodes, modes of transportation, ease of movement, and above all an integrated land-use planning approach, supportive of successful transportation planning. A timely prediction and assessment of growth attributes can help in prioritizing the planning efforts along with expenditure on infrastructure building. Very often such attributes are intangible and require a qualitative assessment based on human perception. Main objective is to put forth a methodology that includes the quantitative assessment of qualitative or ‘human experience’-based inputs as a part of this paper. The method used includes mainly three phases: first phase includes the Delphi survey for getting the qualitative inputs of the attributes considered, the relative importance of the attributes is gauged using the AHP technique, and the outcome in terms of crisp quantitative assessment is derived using the fuzzy mathematical procedure. Outcomes can help in assessment of the ‘sustainability status’ as compared to certain ‘best practice’ scenario and thus can help devise strategies and policy formulation towards achieving the same.