A two-phase decision making based on the grey analytic hierarchy process for evaluating the issue of park-and-ride facility location

Planning a Park-and-Ride (P&R) system in an urban area of a city depends on a group of transportation planning professionals with different areas of expertise in mobility, agreeing on which criteria or set of criteria are the most important. In addition to analysing the criteria established as mobility policies in the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP), when establishing a set of facilities belonging to the P&R system. To find out which criterion is the most important one when combining the mobility criteria established in the SUMP with the criteria of transportation planners with different expertise, this paper applies the multi-criteria method known as the Grey Analytic Hierarchy Process (G-AHP). In this method, at first the main and secondary criteria are determined at two levels that allow building a hierarchical structure, then transportation professionals are surveyed, and finally, the formulation of the multi-criteria method is designed. The result of the study illustrates the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed multi-criteria method to determine the hierarchy of criteria from most to least important to solve the problem of locating a P&R system. Also, the results are compared with two different multicriteria methods (FAHP and BWM) to see how they are alike and how they are different. The finding suggests that the planning of a P&R system and the criterion for the accessibility of public transport go hand in hand, regardless of the multi-criteria method employed.