Prioritizing Locations for Safety Improvement: An Integrated Disutility-Based Approach

Location prioritization is a crucial phase of transportation planning and requires a rational approach to achieve acceptable results. This research applies an integrated multi-criteria decision-making framework in location prioritization for road safety improvement. The objective of the study was to prioritize two locations from each of four national highways, four districts, and four urban neighborhoods in Bangladesh. The framework adopted a disutility-based approach integrated with the best-worst method (BWM) to determine the most hazardous locations among the alternatives from a road safety standpoint. The alternatives were evaluated based on criteria and sub-criteria, such as traffic parameters and demographic factors. The relative weights of criteria and sub-criteria were estimated from pair-wise comparison conducted by a team of experts, decision-makers, and stakeholders using a modified Delphi approach. The criteria concerning safety hazards were considered as disutility and appraised as a negative value, whereas the facility-related criteria were considered as utility and appraised as a positive value. Altogether, the total sum of disutility and utility value for a particular location revealed the existing safety scenario. Results show that the developed models were able to effectively prioritize among the alternatives maintaining a very high consistency ratio. The findings presented in this paper can work as a framework for location prioritization globally.