Sustainability and Public Transportation Theory and Analysis

In the 21st century there is a need to provide sustainable transportation systems in cities to ensure that they remain centres of innovation, quality of life, and economic development. Public transit is often framed as a high potential mode of sustainable urban travel and while much research has been done on other modes of travel, comprehensive research into its sustainability benefits of public transit has been limited. This thesis first reviews the literature on sustainability and sustainable transport to develop a framework to analyze public transit and then applies the framework to 33 mass transit systems from the USA using the National Transit Database. The Public Transit Sustainable Mobility Analysis Project (PTSMAP) framework developed in this thesis utilizes environmental, economic, social and system effectiveness factors to compare the relative performance of Heavy Rail and Light rail systems while demonstrating how composite sustainability index techniques can be applied to public transit analysis. An application of this framework to a real world transit planning scenario is also presented using data from the TransLink UBC Line Phase 2 study report. Both demonstrations of the PTSMAP framework demonstrate a new way to analyze transit based on sustainability and aid in future research and decision making scenarios.