Highway Transportation, Health, and Social Equity: A Delphi-ANP Approach to Sustainable Transport Planning

Raghad Almashhour (), Mohamed AlQahtani and Malick Ndiaye
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Raghad Almashhour: Department of Industrial Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah 26666, United Arab Emirates
Mohamed AlQahtani: Department of Industrial Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah 26666, United Arab Emirates
Malick Ndiaye: Department of Industrial Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah 26666, United Arab Emirates

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 22, 1-38

Abstract: It has become standard practice for governments and transportation engineers around the world to infuse sustainability principles into their plans as higher-level goals and priorities, with indicators to reflect the same. The transformation towards sustainable mobility should involve the three interconnected pillars of sustainable development: environment, social equity, and economy. These pillars, known in the business field as the ‘triple-bottom-line’, require specific indicators that can be used to measure the attainment of each pillar. There is evidence that the social equity impacts of construction projects, such as transport projects, and their distributional effects across various segments of society have traditionally been viewed as secondary or subsidiary concerns relative to their economic and environmental impacts. Recognizing the relative relegation in both academic and policy circles of social impacts and the ‘weak’ tools to identify such impacts, this research aims to employ a hybrid decision method based on the analytic network process and Delphi method to identify the major adverse impacts of highway automobiles on health and social equity in the UAE. In doing so, governments will be better positioned to mitigate adverse impacts through engineering, urban planning, technological, and other appropriate initiatives. Throughout the Delphi process, 15 health and social equity indicators have been validated by experts in the field of sustainability and transportation through an iterative process. Then, experts in the same field were chosen to develop and validate the ANP model based on the validated indicators through pairwise comparison questionnaires. The results and findings revealed that the experts’ judgment preferences are consistent (inconsistency value less than 0.1), wherein the highest priority is the ‘Safety’ indicator, and the lowest priority is the ‘Public participation in transport decision’ indicator.

Keywords: sustainable mobility; social equity; multicriteria decision-making (MCDM); transportation impacts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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