Effectiveness can be measured by service utilization (ridership), service quality, and accessibility to the service. , effectiveness indicates the degree to which people feel that buses are available to meet their daily travel demands at a lower cost. The efficiency and effectiveness are required to be considered separately in a public transport system. Public bus services should transport the passengers efficiently and effectively from both demand and supply perspectives. In addition, the bus transportation system requires less initial capital investment compared to other public transportation systems. It reduces the use of personal vehicles and thus reduces pollution as well as traffic jams. The bus transportation system plays a vital role in transporting passengers in most cities. The demand for higher capacity and easy access to the bus transportation system is generally increased along with cities’ growth. Increasing the population growth rate in cities has generated the need for different transportation systems. We use a real example to illustrate that DEA solutions sometimes may not be implemented due to their harmful negative consequences. This study uses AIMSUN simulation software to pre-evaluate the negative effects of DEA solutions on critical exogenous social and environmental variables. Thus, the magnitude of possible negative consequences of DEA solutions, especially on critical social and environmental variables, should be estimated before their implementation.

If the magnitude of this pollution or traffic is too high, decision-makers (DMs) may ignore improving the efficiency of that BL. However, it may indirectly increase the use of personal vehicles, resulting in more pollution and traffic. For example, reducing the number of buses on an inefficient line can increase its efficiency. Although these variables are not directly related to measuring BLs’ efficiency, they may affect the implementation of DEA solutions.

Moreover, DEA solutions may negatively affect exogenous variables, in particular social and environmental variables. However, DEA can consider only a few attributes when evaluating BLs, while this evaluation requires big data to be considered. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a mathematical programming model that can measure the performance of BLs and provide solutions to improve the performance of inefficient BLs. Therefore, solutions are needed to make it efficient. A bus line (BL) may be inefficient compared to the other BLs. The bus network, including several bus lines (BLs), is the most important public transportation system in many cities.

Aimsun mesoscopic model