Urbanization occurring at an accelerated rate has heightened the burden on urban mobility infrastructures. In the era dominated by automobiles, various public transit options exist, including, auto-rickshaws, taxis, shared vans, buses, metros, and local trains. Hence, it becomes essential to tackle the challenge of enhancing transportation systems and devise a comprehensive approach for selecting the best public transit mode. Individual passenger employs diverse decision-making heuristics when choosing a particular transportation mode, considering factors such as travel cost, travel duration, waiting time, safety, comfort, and availability. This study identifies six important criteria such as travel time, travel cost, waiting time, suitability, accessibility, and safety to select the best transportation mode of Pune city. The analytical hierarchy method (AHP) is used to establish each criterion’s weighting (importance). In this work, four public transportation options—metros, taxis, buses, and auto-rickshaws—are evaluated using the well-known multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach, which is based on grey relational analysis (GRA). This paper underscores the quest for efficient solutions in public transportation mobility. Leveraging MCDM methodologies for evaluating public transit systems to enhance investment appraisal, thereby refining less favored modes of public transportation to bolster customer satisfaction.