Abstract
After deregulation, the role of ensuring rural public transportation was assumed by local governments. If public transportation is positioned as a means of guaranteeing the right to survival by local governments, they should identify and maintain the minimum level of public transportation necessary for daily life. In reality, however, many municipalities have adopted the idea of maintaining public transportation that has a certain level of use, based on the income/expenditure ratio or the number of users, or the idea of making the efforts of local residents the condition for public subsidies. Through an analysis of the policy documents of local governments and the literature of experts who have influenced them, this study points out that there is a problem that these discussions have not conceptually distinguished between public transportation for minimum guarantee and public transportation for additional convenience improvement, partly due to the limitations of the COMMUNITY BUS boom period. This may have diluted the policy objective of municipalities to identify and guarantee minimum public transportation.
