Selecting the best route location for bus rapid transit using geographic information system (gis): kut city is a case study

Abstract

Traffic congestion is one of the major problems that most cities face in Iraq. Traffic congestion leads to increased delays, fatigue, vehicle operating costs, pollution. Congestion increases with every additional vehicle on the road. And the city of Kut is one of the Iraqi cities, which after 2003 witnessed a significant increase in the number of vehicles at the expense of public transport as a result of the improvement in the economic situation and the raising of the standard of living for individuals, which was accompanied by the possibility of buying a private car, which negatively affected the traffic in the city, especially at peak times .This study aims to propose a new means of public transport in the city of Kut, bus rapid transit, and the main purpose is to encourage citizens to leave the private car to alleviate traffic congestion by refining the level of service and performance for the public transport system in the city and the citizen’s comfort as a final outcome by delivering citizens to their place of residence or their place of work as soon as possible and at the lowest cost. In this study, geographic information system was adopted in processing and analyzing data and applying a program AHP to calculate criteria weights. The geospatial analysis approach was used to choose the route and within the basic design of the city of Kut by searching for sites that meet the choice criteria employing the advantages of GIS in the ability to overlay and merge maps and the network analysis.