Urban Railway Corridor Planning Based on Multi Criteria Decision Making Techniques

The issue of traffic congestion is one of the most important problems that has to be solved in near future of İstanbul. Due to the fast urbanization process, new urban areas and new employment zones will increase this problem in the coming years. Instead of highway projects that will be temporary solutions, high capacity rail‐based transit systems must be constructed to overcome the rapidly increasing travel demand. Transportation is the major investment area of İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality and urban railway systems have the top priority among all other alternatives. The total length of the current railway network, which was 45,1 km before the year of 2004, is 145,5 km now. It is planned to firstly extend these lines to 454,2 km until 2019, to 603,7 km until 2024, and then to 974,05 km after the year of 2024. These investments need huge budgets reaching to billions of US dollars and very significant for national economy. Therefore they have to be planned very carefully to gain maximum efficiency and profitability. This study aims to direct railway investments in accordance with the physical and human geography. A new point of view has been developed based on integrating the traditional railway route design processes with Geographic Information Systems and Multi Criteria Decision Making techniques within the scope of the study. This new and accurate decision support system will be useful for both decision makers and the design engineers. As a result of the study, the proposed railway route design model has been successfully applied on the case study area, İstanbul. In addition, some conceptual new railway routes have been proposed after interpreting the analysis results.