Identifying criteria for effective urban vehicle access regulations adoption

Background Urban Vehicle Access Regulations (UVAR) hold great potential to reduce negative transport externalities driven by increased mobility demand and rapid urbanisation. However, as they are potential measures to the wicked problem of climate change mitigation and achieving overall sustainability, their implementation pathways are often complex due to the multidimensionality of sustainability and other challenges. Although decision support tools like the multi-criteria decision analysis might help simplify these complexities, selecting the appropriate criteria based on the peculiarity of UVAR remains pertinent. This study contributes to the sustainable transport decision support literature to address this challenge by identifying relevant criteria for the UVAR measure planning process using the Delphi survey approach. Results It begins with 23 criteria systematically selected from scientific literature and clustered into four dimensions in the first round. This was expanded into 30 criteria and five dimensions in the second survey round based on the participating experts' ratings and rankings. The consensus results showed that most of the identified criteria were considered to be of great potential in UVAR measure planning, with public acceptability, stakeholder engagement, political agenda, and the potential impacts on air pollution and accessibility considered the most important. Conclusions Apart from helping urban authorities select feasible and effective UVAR measures, the resulting assessment structure will also help identify the main barriers and drivers for UVAR adoption. The assessment structure will also aid the monitoring and evaluation phases of the measures upon implementation.