One of the most important impacts of access to transportation infrastructure is the economic and social well-being of residents. However, it is important to know, how much of an impact it has? Which of the access routes-road, rail, or air-has more impact? What methods can be used to assess this effect? Does this effect vary from country to country? This study attempts to provide a framework to examine the correlation between the access of a country’s cities (to various types of rail, air, and road transportation networks) and the economic and social parameters of its inhabitants. For this purpose, the connection of the city to the rail network was calculated by taking into account the distance in time between the city and the nearest station. A city’s road access is calculated by finding the average road distance of a city to other cities in that country. A city’s access to air traffic is calculated based on the weekly flights of that city’s airport (if that city has an airport). To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, a case study is conducted in Iran. The results of the case study show that the access of cities to transportation networks strongly influences economic development and population size in Iran. Pearson’s correlation coefficients between transport infrastructure and economic growth and population size are 0.641 and 0.725, respectively. It was also found that among the transport networks, road transport is more correlated with economic development and unemployment rate of Iranian cities compared to other transport modes.

Today, due to the growing importance of sustainable development in urban areas, the decision to prioritize different transportation options in an area where users have to combine different transportation modes has received much attention in the scientific community. In this research, different modes of transportation including pedestrians, taxis, buses, and bicycles are considered as a combination of two different transportation modes in Tehran’s densely populated area. With the aim of prioritizing travel options in order to achieve sustainable urban development, public transport users were first asked about their travel means preferences. Next, by obtaining the opinions of urban transportation experts of Tehran Municipality regarding sustainable development of urban transportation, a set of transportation options in this area were prioritized on the basis of some criteria optimized using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. The results indicate that air pollution and noise pollution, with the score of 0.33 and 0.24, respectively, were the two most important criteria for choosing a trip mode in dense population areas according to the opinion of transportation and traffic experts of Tehran. The AHP analysis indicated that the use of combined bicycle-walk mode with a score of 0.282 is the most preferred option, while bus-bicycle mixed mode with a score of 0.116 is the least preferred. Survey data indicate that there is a significant difference between people’s general preferences in choosing their urban transportation options and the sustainable urban development approach.

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