Developing Transportation Livability-Related Indicators for Green Urban Road Rating System in Taiwan

Abstract

Although indicators in rating systems have been initiated to measure and promote the sustainability performance of roadway projects in some developed countries, applying those indicators to other regions/countries may still be difficult. In response to the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, local road agencies in Taiwan urgently need to establish systematic and quantifiable sustainable roadway strategies. As part of the project to develop a green urban road rating system in Taiwan, this study aims to develop transportation livability-related indicators (TLIs) and identify critical barriers to TLI application in Taiwan’s urban road system. To this end, the research employed an adaptive approach that integrates top-down and bottom-up approaches. The top-down approach included the comprehensive literature review and panel discussion to derive four TLIs and 21 corresponding requirements, and nine potential barriers to hold the indicator adoption. Four TLIs are pedestrian facilities, universal design, multimodal transportation, and utility facilities. The bottom-up approach used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to assign weights to proposed indicators/requirements. Four critical barriers were also investigated through the Weighted Sum Model (WSM) method, namely unfavorable in-situ conditions, lack of stakeholders’ coordination, unsupported government policy and regulation, and limited budget and schedule. The findings can be beneficial to engineers and decisionmakers to enhance the livability standard of urban streets. The framework proposed in this research can be applied to other roadway characteristics aspects in different regions/countries.

Universal Model to Predict Expected Direction of Products Quality Improvement

“…Therefore, the model can be useful for an entity (expert, broker, or bidder) to determine relevant improvement actions to improve currently existing products. The proposed model was developed by combining these instruments: SMART(-ER) method (S-specific, M-measurable, A-achievable, R-relevant, realistic, or reward, T-'based on timeline' or timebound, E-exciting or evaluated, R-recorded or reward) [32], brainstorming method (BM) [33], survey with Likert scale [1,[34][35][36], Weighted Sum Model (WSM) [3,[37][38][39], relative states scale [3,4,40], and Naïve Bayesian Classifier (NBC) [41][42][43][44]. The general concept of the model is shown in Figure 1.…”

“…To calculate the quality level, it is assumed that the WSM method (Weighted Sum Model) is not complicated [3]. The choice of the method results from its usefulness in assessing product quality with respect to the weighting of the criteria and the evaluation of the quality of these criteria [37,38]. Additionally, the method does not take into account the units of measurement of the criteria, so there is no need to normalize the customer ratings [49].…”

“…Quality is estimated separately from the assessment of product states. The formula for calculating the product quality in the WSM method is shown in Equation ( 1) [3,[37][38][39]:…”

“…The universality of the model refers to the universal character of the tools, which were implemented and sequentially combined [57]. For example, the WSM method does not include measure values of criteria; therefore, it allows the estimation of product quality for any criteria, which can be qualitative or quantitative [3,[37][38][39].…”

Development and Application of a Model Measuring Public Safety in Taiwan

“…Wakchaure & Jha [39] used the AHP to solve bridge maintenance problems in a scenario involving resource limitations. Tran et al [40] used the AHP to develop transportation livability-related indicators; these indicators provided a green urban road rating system for Taiwan. ey also identified key barriers to applying these indicators in Taiwan's urban road systems.…”