Public Transport in Rural Roads: Measures to Increase Its Modal Share in Iran

The supply and demand management of rural public transport has gained an important place in Iran, given its decreasing trend over the last decade. Accordingly, an effective approach is to analyze stakeholders’ opinions in this field to identify the effective local solutions for increasing the share of this transport method. The used methodology was to design a mixed questionnaire, a part of which included fuzzy pairwise comparison, while, in its first layer, the variables were classified using rotary analysis. In the other two sections of the questionnaire, the respondents were asked to express their opinions regarding the questions in the form of qualitative and words cloud. According to the inquiries made from the users in 20 selected terminals of Iran providing services to more than 85% of rural passengers, the indicators were weighted and divided into two groups based on the rotary analysis. The weighted results obtained from the users’ opinions revealed that the safety, dynamics of incentive policies, and traffic system performance in the rural transport had the highest effects on the micro- and macro-level indicators. In the second section, based on the qualitative questions, a multivariate linear estimation model of the number of rural passengers was constructed. Moreover, in the third section, the users’ suggested keywords focused on policy-making, travel time optimization, quality of services, and safety. Both the second and third sections had an acceptable agreement with the pairwise comparisons. Given the vast area of Iran and the distance between the population centers in the country, the obtained solutions to increase the share of public rural road transport included reducing the desirability of travel with private cars in short rural distances through interaction with industrial towns around metropolises, along with providing such areas with special services to attract passengers to rural transport with occupational goals.