Abstract
Although high-speed railway (primarily Shinkansen) networks have shown improvement in recent years, such services still lag in some areas. As for air travel, following deregulation, some carriers abandoned domestic air routes that were unprofitable and reduced services to others. Therefore, intercity travel times have actually increased in some areas of Japan. However, intercity mobility is different for each pair of cities, and improvements to transportation infrastructure and services are often the subject of intense debate when needs to rectify regional disparities are discussed. The purpose of this study is to clarify disparities of Japanese intercity mobility from 1971 to 2009 using the Malmquist index. Following which, the causes of increasing or decreasing disparities in intercity mobility are analyzed. The results of this study indicate that intercity mobility disparities showed decreasing trends prior to 1991. However, since 1994, such disparities have increased slightly.
