الفهرس 
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Abstract
The movement of people and goods increases significantly in metropolitan areas of developing countries due to the rapid population growth. However, too much traffic on a finite traffic infrastructure negatively influences the natural resources, the environment, and the urban image. As developing countries have begun to increase their economic activities, the level of service on the already congested road networks starts to deteriorate. In addition, investments have been concentrated on new road facilities, and not on creating attractive public transport systems. In such metropolitan areas, there are already a lot of public transport projects resulting from different transportation studies. However, the decision for implementing one or more of these projects has not been taken so far because of the conflicting opinions and the lack of a mechanism for screening and prioritizing the candidate projects. In this thesis, the current techniques used for evaluating and rating transportation projects are reviewed and a new procedure for a comprehensive evaluation of transportation projects (CETP) is developed. The proposed procedure provides great advantages by integrating the benefits of the cost-effectiveness with indicators reflecting the community needs and goals, and takes into consideration the four essential sustainable criteria (economic, social, environmental, and transport efficiency). It can deal with quantitative criteria and qualitative criteria, either with “less is better” or “more is better” indicators, and takes direct and indirect impacts into consideration. Other two facts is also considered: (1) large scale urban public transport projects in developing countries are nonprofit and depend mainly on public funds, and (2) the transport tariff is not economic, but social and subsidized. CETP is based on integration between Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Thus, it can compose benefits of both techniques. These two techniques are chosen because of their capability to deal with preference-based decisions over a lot of alternative options based on criteria that are characterized by multiple, usually conflicting, attributes. CEPT organizes the decision-making problem into a relative logic hierarchy structure including the following consequence steps: defining the relative importance of the four sustainable criteria, identifying the indicators of the sustainable criteria and indicating their relative importance, prioritizing projects options regarding the indicators (Global Priority), rating projects options according to priorities aggregation, and determining a visual composite sustainability level for each Option. The application confirms the practicality and capability of the proposed procedure and program CETP for comprehensive evaluation of large-scale and long-term transport projects. It can investigate precisely a large number of project options and a wide range of indicators to identify clearly superior options. CEPT produces a global priority index which is used for rating the project options, and a composite sustainability level, which presents the percentage of the achieved sustainability of each option to the maximum achievable sustainability. CETP can also support the decision making through a visual presentation of the interrelationships between indicators and results. The visual presentation allows preforming a sensitivity test and a trade-offs analysis in situations where uncertainties exist in the definition of criteria weights.
Keywords: developing countries, public transport, comprehensive evaluation, sustainable transport, analytical analysis, feasibility studies, visual composed sustainability