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It is challenging to devise a group decision-making process that supports compromise solutions reflecting diverse stakeholders' preferences about multiple criteria. This study illustrates how the combination of multicriteria decision analysis and a group decision-making technique can be used to arrive at solutions that are mutually acceptable to multiple stakeholders when selecting sustainable transport projects. The proposed methodology, in which the collective preference is determined based on the aggregation of individual preferences from all stakeholders, is illustrated through a case study of the prioritization of nine prospective transport projects affecting three stakeholder groups (decision-makers, project designers, and system users) in Tianjin Binhai New Area, China. Specifically, the various projects were evaluated for their probable sustainability performance according to 14 criteria. The results show that the proposed methodology can enable transportation managers to achieve an acceptable solution to a complex project-prioritization problem by understanding the different needs and concerns of diverse stakeholders. It is hoped that the present research will serve as a practical tool for infrastructure managers seeking to build consensus, and helping them to assess the degree of consensus among stakeholders at various points in the process, thereby facilitating effective communication and the coordination of decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decisions managing all modes of transportation are currently based on the traffic rate and travel time. However, other factors such as Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, the sustainability index, fuel consumption, and travel costs are not considered. Therefore, more comprehensive methods need to be implemented to improve transportation systems and support users' decision making in their daily commute. This paper addresses current challenges by utilizing data analytics derived from our proposed mobile application. The proposed application quantifies various factors of each transportation mode including but not limited to the cost, trip duration, fuel consumption, and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions. All calculated travel costs are based on the real-time gas prices and toll fees. The users are also able to navigate to their destination and update the total travel costs in real-time. The emissions data per trip basis are aggregated to provide analytics of emissions usage. The traffic data is collected for the Southern California region and the effectiveness of the application is evaluated by twenty participants from California State University, Long Beach. The results demonstrate the application's impacts on users' decision-making and the propriety of the factors used in route selection. The proposed application can foster urban planning and operations vis-à-vis daily commutes, and as a result improve the citizens' quality of life in various aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts inevitably occur in major transport projects as various stakeholders express diverse, often conflicting needs and concerns, and failing to address and manage these conflicts often leads to project failures. Understanding stakeholders' perceptions and the discrepancies among them is crucial to an effective dialogue among the parties seeking to build consensus. This study investigates the potential influences of stakeholder characteristics as well as project environments on conflicts and consensuses in stakeholders' overall preferences about sustainable transport projects. Data on the perspectives of three stakeholder-group types (system providers, project designers, and system users) with regard to 14 sustainability criteria are drawn from a survey of eight major transport projects across China. Two-way analysis of variance is then carried out to investigate whether or not the differences in the mean scores among stakeholder-group types and cities were statistically significant. The results show that discrepancies of opinion about transport-project sustainability criteria prevail among stakeholder-group types in every region we studied, due to these types' different needs and concerns. Our findings also suggest that special attention should be given to cases in which multiple stakeholder groups assign the same priorities to certain criteria, as those criteria are likely to represent the most serious issues affecting all stakeholders in a given project environment. With regard to the potential influences of project environments, we found that, in general, the discrepancies in stakeholders' prior concerns about sustainability criteria exhibited no obvious geographic pattern. However, exceptions did occur when a specific criterion was of major concern in a given project environment. Taken together, our findings emphasize the necessity of addressing and managing specific local issues, and the divergent concerns of stakeholders, when planning sustainable-transport projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]