Investigating the Social, Economic and Environmental Impacts of Constructing Urban Interchanges (Comparison of the Main Interchanges in the city of Qazvin)

Traffic problems are the most prominent urban dilemmas, especially during recent years, since the capacity of old traffic arteries don’t meet the increasing volume of population and vehicles, therefore, adopting some measures in order to enhance the capacity of existing roads has been placed on the agenda of urban managers. Changing the existing intersections to over changes is one of these methods. It seems that these structures which facilitate traffic dimension in some cases and after a period of time since exploitation make considerable impacts on other dimensions especially in terms of economic and social perspectives on neighborhoods. This research is the result of investigating the impacts caused by construction of four unleveled crosses of Shahid Motahari, Kowsar (Shahid Rajaei), Sardaran, and Seyed Hasan Nasrallah (Nasr) on their surrounding neighborhoods in Qazvin city and during a 6-year period since 2011 to 2016. Extracting and investigating the existing documentary data from prior-to-construction to the end of research period besides obtaining the comments of citizens and managers and then, statistically analyzing the results of SPSS and how the impacts affect neighborhoods and desirability rate of crossroads in terms of being overpass or underpass were of the main goals of this research. Also, developing the SWOT charts and applying the AHP method and recommending the practical solutions on the basis of extracted results in order to enhance desirability and to reduce negative effects of these crosses were of other measures performed in this study.