AbstractsTransportation

After the Second World War, America saw a decline in ridership on transit systems which eventually resulted in the dismantling and abandonment of many rail systems. The primary mode of public transportation shifted from transit to buses, which used the same streets and competed with the same infrastructure capacity as automobiles. For this reason, bus systems also started to fail when people realized that if they have to wait for the traffic, they might as well do it in their own automobile, which provides higher flexibility of timing and route (Ditmar, Belzer and Autler, 2004). This shift, in effect, resulted in more congestion. To counter the problem of congestion resulting from modern urbanization, society developed the idea of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). TOD (or similar concepts like transit village, transit-friendly design, and transit-supportive development) is a type of development designed in a fashion that encourages the use of public transit and the creation of pedestrian-friendly environments (TCRP, 2002). This thesis answers the following fundamental questions: How can a transit agency choose among alternative TOD locations within a transit network and what is the importance of each factor? This includes development of a framework which can be used by different transit agencies by incorporating their factors and weights using multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) tool called Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The thesis also presents the implementation of this framework for Regional Transportation District (RTD) and Roaring Fork Transportation Authority (RFTA). Advisors/Committee Members: Strong, Kelly C. (advisor), Ozbek, Mehmet E. (advisor), Francis, James (committee member).