A new look at planning and designing transportation systems: A decision-making model based on cognitive rationality, stakeholder engagement and quantitative methods

Transportation systems are complex sociotechnical systems and this dual nature is reflected in the literature dealing with their planning, i.e. defining courses of action from both public and private points of view. On the one hand, the social sciences literature makes it clear that most decisions related to transportation are “wicked”, i.e. they cannot be tackled with traditional engineering approaches since they are poorly defined. On the other, transportation systems have a strong technical component affecting most of such decisions, as they have to (or should) comply with compelling technical and economic requirements. The literature on transport engineering and economics deals with transportation planning mostly as a rational process based on the formulation and comparison of alternative options.