sustainability Article Managing Sustainable Urban Public Transport Systems: An AHP Multicriteria Decision Model Lourdes Rivero Gutiérrez 1 , María Auxiliadora De Vicente Oliva 2 and Alberto Romero-Ania 3, *   Citation: Rivero Gutiérrez, L.; De Vicente Oliva, M.A.; Romero-Ania, A. Managing Sustainable Urban Public Transport Systems: An AHP Multicriteria Decision Model. Sustainability 2021, 13, 4614. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13094614 Academic Editor: Art ¯ uras Kaklauskas Received: 28 March 2021 Accepted: 19 April 2021 Published: 21 April 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Department of Business Administration, Rey Juan Carlos University, Paseo Artilleros s/n, 28032 Madrid, Spain; lourdes.rivero@urjc.es 2 Department of Finance Economy and Accounting, Rey Juan Carlos University, Paseo Artilleros s/n, 28032 Madrid, Spain; maria.devicente@urjc.es 3 Department of Applied Economics, Rey Juan Carlos University, Paseo Artilleros s/n, 28032 Madrid, Spain * Correspondence: alberto.romero@urjc.es Abstract: The current combination of sustainable social awareness and the improved decision support systems, including multiple criteria decision models for sustainable development, creates the need for more efficient and accurate public policy decisions based on available technology. The continuous growth of urban public road transport in large cities, and therefore the worsening of air quality, along with recent economic crisis derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, is forcing public administrations to analyze the viability of current models, taking into consideration sustainable alternative energies. This study proposes a novel and consistent analytic hierarchy process (AHP) multicriteria decision- making (MCDM) model that combines both economic and environmental criteria, to evaluate public road transportation vehicles according to their alternative engine technologies and combustion characteristics. The proposed model has been applied to evaluate Madrid’s urban public road transport, based on 2020 data published by the Madrid City Council, compiled by authors, and assessed by a panel of 20 experts to identify criteria and factors included in the AHP-MCDM model. The findings illustrate the economic and environmental impact of alternative vehicles, show that the most sustainable alternative is the plug-in electric vehicle in economic and environmental terms, and assist policymakers and firms in future strategic decisions regarding sustainable urban transport policies. Keywords: sustainability; sustainable public transport; urban transport policies; environment; sustainable social awareness; green vehicles; AHP multicriteria decision-making 1. Introduction Sustainability is a concept of essential importance in modern societies, and therefore today’s policymakers must take into consideration not only economic, but also environ- mental criteria. In this sense, decisions related to urban public road transport in large cities are one of the best examples of how traditional models undergo metamorphosis due to green technologies. The current tendency in modern large cities is to incorporate vehicles with sustain- able alternative energies into their urban public road transport networks, with old and new technologies coexisting with different sustainability levels, i.e., dissimilar economic performance and environmental impact. The aim of this research is to assess public buses depending on their fuel technologies in terms of sustainability. In this paper, the attention is focused on the case of Madrid; nevertheless, the results can be extrapolated to other densely populated cities, because both vehicle alternatives and city transport necessities are similar in large cities. Although two centuries ago Malthus [1] urged the need to study and determine the impact of human activity on the environment together with a concern for finding a form of economic development that meets people’s current needs without compromising the Sustainability 2021, 13, 4614. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13094614 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability