Reasoning-Building Process for Transportation Project Evaluation and Decision Making

Policy makers for transportation investment projects engage in dialogues and debates in which reasonableness and clarity are of great value. In traditional transportation systems planning practices, stakeholders reason and provide evidence in support of their preferences, but these opinions often conflict and are rarely consistent. This paper presents a goal-oriented decision-making method for finding a transportation alternative that best achieves the project's goals and also indicates the level of stakeholders’ satisfaction. The proposed method (a) applies a reasoning map for structuring how experts and citizens perceive the alternatives for achieving the project's goals and (b) provides belief measures in evidence theory about to what extent the alternatives achieve the goals of the stakeholders. This method gives three kinds of results. First, the degrees of goal achievement can be calculated for the various stakeholders. Second, both the integrity of the reasoning and the quality of information are evaluated according to measures of uncertainty associated with this information. Finally, the critical reasoning links that matter most to goal achievement can be identified through sensitivity analysis. The paper applies the proposed method to evaluate a streetcar alternative against a bus rapid transit alternative in a real-world analysis of transit alternatives. The reasoning-building process allows planners and citizens to present their logic and justifications, promotes focused discourse of stakeholders, and enriches the quality of the planning and decision-making process.