Why Have Travel Surveys of Urban Railway Successfully Incorporated Public and Private Participations in Tokyo Metropolitan Area?

Abstract

In this paper, the critical factors affecting a successful cooperative travel survey system for urban public transit are analyzed by means of a case study of Tokyo, Japan. To this end, both public and private entities participate in developing an integrated travel database. This study reviews the Metropolitan Transport Census, which is a large-scale travel survey in three metropolitan areas of Japan, mainly covering travel supply and demand of urban railway services. This survey has a cooperative framework in which the government, private/public railway companies, and transportation academics/experts jointly design the survey, collect data, and process and analyze the data. The survey database also contributes to the development of a series of policy management processes, including the development of long-term urban railway development masterplans with dynamic interactions between the government and the railway companies. The advantages and disadvantages of participating in the integrated survey for both the government and the private/public railway companies are also examined. The results reveal that a potential reason for the success of the survey system is the win-win situation in which the vision of public transit planning presented by the government is in line with the business strategies of the private railway companies. This alignment of goals is highly reliant on a mechanism of interactive communication among the stakeholders. This is achieved through a cooperative policy management process in which both the government and the railway companies are directly or indirectly governed by third parties, including taxpayers, investors, and customers.