Ahp-based Decesion-making Process for Construction of Public Transportion City Model: Case Study of Jeju, Korea

Traffic congestion that results from the increased traffic demand due to the creation of new infrastructure (i.e., a newly built highway) has become a very serious problem in Korea that causes unnecessary social cost. To solve this problem, more effective transportation demand management should be considered simultaneously with the promotion of public transportation. New policies that promote transit ridership are appearing as a result of issues such as capacity and the environment. The most suitable and effective public transportation policies are planned and executed within the context of a long-term strategy due to their large time and money costs. Therefore, a public transportation model should be developed after an adequate evaluation process in order to maximize social benefit and efficiency. Methods for evaluating many alternative policies have already been introduced. The monetary evaluation methods (such as Cost-Benefit Analysis) have some limitations in reflecting various factors, especially considering qualitative variables that are related to decision-making problems. On the contrary, the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) is a flexible model that deals with the qualitative variables and allows us to make decisions by personal judgment in a logical way. This paper provides a new decision-making process that is related to policies on the promotion of public transportation ridership. This paper also includes implementation of the process to the construction of a ‘JEJU’ public transportation city model to verify the applicability of the AHP method. Since the new method includes a multi-criteria (particularly qualitative variables) analysis process and reflects expert opinions, it is therefore very useful for finding a more broadly acceptable solution for goal-oriented policy making. Planners and decision-makers can easily use this new method to prioritize transportation projects.