An evaluation on the criteria to prioritize transportation infrastructure investments in Brazil

• Criteria priorities on transport infrastructure investments in Brazil are assessed.
• The Analytic Hierarchy Process – AHP is used to identify the most relevant criterion.
• The points of view of four distinct groups were considered.
• The criterion “reduction of transportation costs” was presented as the most relevant.

This paper presents a study on the criteria priorities on the decisions of transportation infrastructure investments in Brazil, based on the application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process – AHP. We consider the definition of a set of seven criteria and respective parameters, structured in four groups: logistics/transportation, economic/financial, social and environmental. Representatives of four different sectors, which contribute to the decision making on transportation in Brazil, were used to find their different points of view about the criteria. With the main aim of prioritization of the criteria, it was considered one of the national policies of Brazilian transportation goals, i.e., the modal split balance of interurban cargo transportation. Thus, each expert provided a pair comparisons of the criteria and pondered their relative importance, attributing weights based upon the scale used by AHP. These comparisons do not consider which projects should be prioritized, but only the importance of each criterion in relation to the others. As a main result, the criterion “reduction of transportation costs” was presented in several scenarios as the most relevant.