Garage Location Selection for Public Transportation System in Istanbul
Read this article. The study covered uses various tools to determine the best location for bus garages to operate including maintenance and repair activities. Focus on Figure 1 in the Methodology section as it visually demonstrates the analytical process.
Introduction
With the increase of the living standards in
Istanbul, the population is asking for a higher service and quality.
This requirement is also including the quality of the public
transportation system. Istanbul Electricity, Tramway and Tunnel (IETT)
General Management, which carries a huge part of the passenger density
as a public transportation corporation, is the most important actor in
Istanbul traffic. Serving in high quality is very difficult in Istanbul,
when the constraints are considered, like road conditions, number of
vehicles, and high density of the passengers especially in the peak
hours. The number of the buses is increasing day by day in proportion to
the population of the city. Besides, this increase brings extra
problems caused by the ages of the buses, accidents in the traffic, lack
of the road infrastructures, and overusing the buses. Maintenance
activities, especially, have a vital importance on journeys to eliminate
these problems and to ensure customer satisfaction without failures.
The
difficulties in Istanbul for effective public transportation are rapid
and unplanned public development, historical settlement texture,
population, rapid increase in vehicle and transportation requirements,
and geographical features (rough topography, Bosphorus and The Golden
Horn). As an indicator, there are 13,532,745 average passengers in
public transportation system of Istanbul and 2,039,837 of them use IETT.
This is a very high number when it is compared with the world average.
IETT carries passengers with a 334 bus fleet in bus rapid transit (BRT)
system and with 2,279 buses in other lines.
In bus garages, the
repair and maintenance activities and corrective and preventive actions
are done. There are nine garages in IETT and the number of busses and
the spaces are shown in Table 1.
Table 1 Specifications of garages.
Garage | Number of buses per garage | Total space (m2) | Indoor space (m2) |
|
|||
İkitelli | 528 | 192,000 | 28,000 |
Anadolu | 404 | 58,200 | 10,000 |
Topkapı | 125 | 17,588 | 7,100 |
Edirnekapı | 400 | 60,000 | 6,720 |
Ayazağa | 314 | 102,275 | 11,500 |
Hasanpaşa | 368 | 37,000 | 4,000 |
Kağıthane | 220 | 65,000 | 7,920 |
Beykoz Şahinkaya | 147 | 13,000 | 2,300 |
Sarıgazi | 137 | 15,000 | 1,420 |
|
|||
Total | 2,619 | 560,063 | 78,960 |
|
|
Year | Maintained bus number |
(daily average) | |
|
|
2011 | 33 |
2010 | 35 |
2009 | 35 |
2008 | 37 |
2007 | 47 |
|
|
* The data has been collected from the annual reports that are published on IETT website. |
In this study, we try to determine the best locations for bus garages to operate the maintenance and repair activities. There are many important criteria that affect the location decisions, like cost, time, infrastructure, environment, accessibility, other macro factors, and so forth. Istanbul is a growing city and the land use is very important in terms of the city master plans. Therefore, probable places for bus garages are determined by the IETT authorities and best alternative is selected considering the above-mentioned criteria. These criteria are constituted considering EN 13816 standards which try to promote a quality transport operations and focus interest on customers’ needs and expectations.
An integrated MCDM technique, fuzzy AHP and fuzzy AD, is used for this purpose. Fuzzy AHP is used to weight the criteria according to the precise and imprecise judgments of the decision makers. Then the obtained weights of the criteria are utilized as an input data in fuzzy AD to determine the precedencies of the alternative locations.