SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF TRANSPORTATION MEASURES – AN EVALUTION OF ODD EVEN SCHEME IN DELHI

Abstract

With ever-increasing urbanization many cities of developing countries suffer from the rapid increase in vehicle ownership despite the fact that the road network density and the road widths still remain inadequate. Moreover, the level of utilization of public transport system remains pathetically low in cities of most of the developing countries especially in Delhi the capital city of India where, urbanization is at fore-front with massive increase in private vehicle ownership. This tremendous increase in the number of vehicle has resulted in congestion in road network, increased air pollution, reduced speeds, and increase in road accidents. The lack of proper urban transport management strategies and neglect of roads, and safety to the cyclists, pedestrians and lack of policies to promote public transportation have complicated the urban transport scenario. To cater above discussed problems, the government of NCT Delhi came up with a transportation measure named “Odd-Even Scheme” and implemented it temporarily as social experiment in two phases fifteen days each and completed its test period with mixed responses but for the actual evaluation, it is necessary to evaluate the above measure in term of sustainability that is to evaluate its impact on the sustainability of the transportation system. So for sustainability assessment of above mentioned transportation measure, this study presents a hybrid approach based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Dempster Shafer theory in which AHP is used to structure and rate the evaluation criteria and D-S theory is used to fuse the data coming from multiple information sources. The proposed approach comprises of multiple steps. In the first step we identify the criteria for sustainability evaluation. AHP is used to structure and rate the criteria. In the second step we test the basic probability function of increase, decrease, and no change due to implementation of transportation measure for sustainability and collect data from multiple information sources like human expert, public opinion surveys, sensors/actual measurement, models, etc on the selected criteria for evaluation purposes. The information from multiple data sources is combined using Dempster-Shafer theory. In the third step, we estimate the state of sustainability of transportation system using a Transportation Sustainability Index (TSI). The transportation sustainability index is computed at two stages at the pre- and post-implementation stages of the transportation measure. In the fourth step, we assess the impact of transportation measure on the sustainability of transportation system by observing the difference between the values at pre- and post test stages. If an increase in the value of TSI is observed, then the impact of transportation measure on the sustainability of transportation system is judged as positive and is recommended for adoption.