Breaking away from the dependence on cars, increasing the number of public transport users, and securing operational revenues have been posing a problem for many cities worldwide. In Oyama City, Japan (population 167,000), the car modal share is approximately 70% and the bus modal share is 0.3%. Buses operated by private companies running in the city were withdrawn in 2008. To solve this problem of car dependent city, oyama city counsil introduced low subscription fares (Max 70% discount on all city bus pass) and mobility management(MM) activities. In this study, we clarified the characteristics of the implementation process and MM tools, and analyzed the effects of the projects from two perspectives: changing citizens’ awareness and behavior, and maintaining the financial stability of the bus management. As an implementation process, the city decided to introduce low-cost citywide bus passes and the pass sales period was tentatively set at one year, and the service was extended and continued for two years, and converted to a permanent service due to no revenue loss. As a feature of the MM tool, a lifestyle information tabloid was adopted so that all citizens could read it with familiarity, three volumes of tabloids were created and distributed to all 53,000 households in the city. As a result of the effectiveness analysis, it was confirmed that the number of pass holders increased 4 times from 118 to 463 (as of March 2022), the number of times pass holders use the bus has increased by 11.5%, and car use has decreased by 27.5%. In addition, MM activities have increased awareness of the pass and increased the number of citizens who have become attached to the bus and the city. These results suggest that the combination of introducing a low-cost citywide pass and MM activities using branding can increase the number of bus users without reducing operating revenues.

Tomohide Azami, Ayako Taniguchi
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, University of Tsukuba
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