Investigating and Analyzing the Barriers to Smart Intra-City Transport in Ahvaz

As the Second Five-Year Development Plan of Ahvaz metropolis (2018-2022) in the transportation and traffic sector puts out, one of the most important strategies for the transportation development in Ahvaz metropolis is to identify barriers to transportation development in its various dimensions. One of the dimensions is the barriers to making transport smart. This issue makes the necessity of doing the present study more significant. The present study aimed to investigate and analyze barriers to make intra-urban transport in Ahvaz. The present research is applied-theoretical in terms of objectives, and descriptive-analytical and survey in terms of method. For data collection, two methods of library and field studies (questionnaire and interview) techniques were employed. The data analysis method was quantitative and the DEMATEL and ANP multi-criteria decision-making techniques were used. The results show that a total of 65 factors were extracted as barriers to make transport system smart. These barriers are divided into management barriers with 21 sub-criteria, economic barriers with 11 barriers with 11 sub-criteria, socio-cultural barriers with 23 sub-criteria, and physical barriers with 10 sub-criteria, among which managers’ weakness of technical knowledge, lack of credit, population growth in Ahvaz, and lack of smart facilities are the most important barriers as sub-criteria of management, economic, socio-cultural and physical factors.