Development of a Decision Support Tool for Safety in Transit Assessment at Stations: A Case Study of Bangkok's Suburban Rail Stations
摘要
Safety is a critical factor influencing the preference and use of public transit, yet it remains one of the most challenging aspects to quantify. Ensuring safety at transit stations, particularly suburban train stations like those on Thailand's Dark Red Line, yields numerous benefits. These include enhanced accessibility to public transportation, better utilization of existing serviced land, increased transit ridership, and reduced vehicular traffic pollution in Bangkok. This research aims to develop criteria and a decision support tool to assist decision-makers in evaluating passenger safety at transit stations in the city. This research focuses on a pilot project involving transit stations along Thailand's Dark Red Line. The study begins by collecting data from all stations along the line and then identifying and determining key safety criteria. These criteria include proximity to bus stops, the number of crime-prone areas, passenger pick-up/drop-off points, CCTV coverage, and traffic accident statistics. Using input from decision-makers, these criteria were weighted and analyzed through the Fuzzy TOPSIS multi-criteria decision-making approach to evaluate stations’ performance. The final ranking was determined using the closeness coefficient from the ideal solution, which identified the station with the highest relative closeness score as the optimal candidate for developing an intermodal transportation hub. A decision support tool was then developed using Microsoft Excel. The findings of this pilot case study provide practical guidelines for station area development. Moreover, the results offer valuable insights that can be extended to other transit lines, improving intermodal connections and guiding the design of built environments that foster safer and more efficient transit systems.