Developing Practical Management Support System for Regional Public Transportation Service Provided by Municipalities

Public transportation is especially important in regions with decreasing population. In Japan, regional transportation suffers financially, because the transportation of local residents alone cannot support through taxes the costs of fixed-route public transportation. Although the situation varies between municipalities, human, and financial constrains prevent these local communities from appropriately addressing this problem. Instead, municipalities hire external traffic consultants to conduct surveys, at a significant cost. As a result, the municipalities receive regular reports from the external traffic consultant on their public transportation situation. However, despite of the large cost of this service burdened by the municipality, the results are not fully available and merely indicative of a temporary situation both in terms of quality and quantity. These results cannot be used for actually improving the improvement in bus service management through timetable revision and adjustment of the fixed route. This would instead require medium-to-long term data on the usage of their community buses. For this reason, our laboratory has been developing a practical service management support system for the regional public transportation provided by municipalities. Within this system, we developed two applications for tablets named ASHIYA and SHINGU. ASHIYA can be used for conducting simple questionnaire surveys for passengers inside community buses, whereas SHINGU records for the number of get-on or get-off passengers.