## 1 Introduction  
The correlation between demand and utilization of public transport and sustainability is widely known not only among experts but also among citizens. However, the connection of demand elements and usage of public transport is not trivial and definitely worth studying. We consider two major components of the demand: different quality elements of urban transport such as comfortability from physical or mental point of view, waiting and travel time, etc.; and price elements such as ticket prices or provided discounts.  
Quality element impacts have been studied by many researchers previously. [PERSON] and [PERSON] conducted a survey in Mersin about different stakeholder group preferences on the amelioration of the urban bus system quality items [1]. [PERSON] et al. emphasized the different emotional responses in the demand of a public service [2], while [PERSON] stressed the importance of quality elements in urban transport planning [3]. [PERSON] et al. listed quality issues for an appropriate public transport system to reach an international airport [4]. [PERSON] et al. investigated the impact of noise pollution in urban areas and the change of citizen demand reacting towards this [5].  
The connection between transport fares and public demand is somewhat contradictory. Although the expected negative correlation (higher fares--lower public transport demand and vice versa) hasbeen proven many times [6; 7; 8; 9] and not only for low income citizens but also for the higher social class, there are also counterexamples. [PERSON] found that price reduction in an urban transport case did not make significant impact on public vehicle utilization [10].  
Recently, experiments on totally free public transportation in some cities has raised the attention of researchers and the public [11; 12].  
As can be seen in the short overview, the connection of demand elements and public mode choice and through this, sustainability issues, is not evident and contradictory in some cases. Consequently, it is definitely worth analyzing the specific situation before making such a significant decision as improving the quality of public transport service or modifying the transport fare system of a city (or even of a country). This decision requires support by a thorough survey on citizens' preferences and processing the results with a scientifically well-proven methodology.  
The objective of this paper is to introduce a well-applicable model based on a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Survey results are also provided on the current public transport demand situation of the capital of Jordan, Amman. It has to be emphasized that this is a pioneer study in terms of pairwise comparison of quality and cost elements in a public transport system case in an integrated AHP survey. Being the first experimental attempt to apply AHP for this purpose, the conventional form of the technique was selected as the methodology because of the reliability of its original tools: the Consistency Ratio (CR) and the sensitivity analysis. The authors of the current paper have previously used more current forms of AHP such as Fuzzy, Interval, Pareto types of AHP, or its combination with Kendall rank correlation [1; 13; 14; 15; 16], however, in this first exploratory case the traditional approach seemed more reliable. The experience of the case study allows us to state that the constructed model is appropriate for supporting public transport system improvement decisions and might be applicable for other, arbitrary cities as well.  
The rest of the paper includes a Methodology section in which the applied model is presented. Afterwards the characteristics of the survey and the results are analyzed. Finally, conclusions are drawn and some suggestions are given for the general application of the methodology and some remarks for further research are provided.