Jointed Plain Concrete Pavements (JPCPs) are considered a sustainable alternative that can resist high traffic demands without invasive maintenance interventions that affect the users of urban pavements. Nowadays short concrete slabs are available as innovations of traditional JPCPs that can reduce the construction costs up to 25% due to the less concrete thickness, the unsealed and non-dowelled joints. In a sustainable and habitable city, an integral analysis must include the needs of the clients for pavements which assign priority to the ride quality. For that, deterioration models with extensive databases to their development and calibration are required. As short slabs are a recent development, nowadays there are not available databases for this purpose, but there is empirical evidence for a functional evaluation in an explicit, traceable and well-sustained way using Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods. This provides a transparent formal decision-making frame to support the decisions that anyway the municipal transportation agencies need to make. As the new design configuration needs to be compared with the traditional one in order to evaluate if effectively it represents an improvement, the objective of the present paper is to compare the ride quality between non-dowelled traditional and short slabs JPCPs using a MCDM method. For that firstly the election of the method is presented. Then a definition of the attributes to evaluate the ride quality is made. After that the quantification of these attributes, the weightings and the pairwise comparisons of the sensitivity analyses based in empirical evidence are presented. Finally, from the 189 comparisons analysed with the Analytic Hierarchy Process method was possible to conclude that the traditional non-dowelled JPCP has higher deterioration of the ride quality, i.e. the short slabs provide better ride quality. One of the relevant explanatory factors is the drastic reduction of crack width at joints of short slabs which produces a radical change in the Load Transfer Efficiency (LTE), from LTE <= 50% of the traditional non-dowelled JPCPs to LTE >= 70% in short slabs.