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Recently the adoption rate of urbanization has increased worldwide, where the majority of people are living in cities, and the number is expected to increase to reach 60 percent by 2030 (United Nations, 2022). The consistent increase in population has been accompanied by depletion of natural resources and environmental contamination. Therefore, moving toward sustainability has become a priority for decision-makers and city planners. It is evident that there is no single approach that can be followed to increase the sustainability inside cities, as the challenges vary from city to city, however, addressing different initiatives and measures can help in drawing on ideas and suggestions. Besides its significant importance to the growth and development of the economy, buses and bus rapid transit remain the dominant transport mode as they are perceived to be the most suitable to transfer passengers between different origins and destinations around the cities (Cervero 2013). In fact, transport demand is growing rapidly, due to a growing population and the economic development within the country and in the region. And with the continuous growth in population, and increasing use of different transportation modes, these negative externalities are expected to grow. However, they produce negative impacts on the environment such as greenhouse gas emissions, traffic congestion, and noise (Macrina et al. 2019). Therefore, it has a significant impact on the environment, where it is responsible for a major amount of air pollution and global warming (Gudmundsson et al. 2016). As a result, these, and other negative impacts on the environment, emphasise the necessity of incorporating sustainability in transportation planning and investment decisions. Therefore, the importance of this paper is in the need to measure the performance of the public transit system, which is the most attractive service provided for people in Jordan, in which the extent of this service achieves the country’s objectives in the line of sustainable development.
The requirements of transit users need to be considered throughout an efficient investment. Therefore, efficient public transit services can generate employment, wealth, and drive economic development (UNDP, 2017). It can ensure an accessible area (Shen et al., 2010), and ensure the elderly and disabled people’s requirements are considered (Valdes-Vasquez et al., 2012). Consequently, in order to have the advantages of public transit services, it is required to measure their sustainability performance. Performance measures help in identifying potential problems and optimal solutions (Alnsour and Omari, 2019). Indeed, measuring the sustainability performance of public services refers to sustainability as a difficult task. Therefore, in this paper, an investigation has been conducted to measure the performance of the public transit system provided. The aim of this paper is to investigate sets of indicators that are used to assess the sustainability of transportation systems developed in the literature worldwide. And use these to indicators to assess the potential sustainability of the BRT system in Amman city from three main perspectives: economic, environmental, and social, in which the extent of this service achieves the country’s objectives in the line of sustainable development. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 provides the literature review. Section 3 is devoted to describing the methodology. The indicators we used to assess the urban transport sustainability for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Amman-Jordan are discussed in section 4.