2024 Volume 80 Issue 20 Article ID: 24-20140
In the aspect of regional public transport policy, the field known as Mobility as a Service (MaaS) has rapidly emerged in recent years. Even before that, the idea of ‘Transport Town Planning’ had existed and developed as a system of thought that ‘promotes town development through collaboration between citizens and government based on addressing regional issues related to transport’. In this paper, we examine all the cases of “Japanese-style MaaS” in fiscal 2020 to see whether the ideals of “Transport Town Planning” are being realized and whether the unilateralism of public transport operators is being removed, with reference to the Basic Act on Transport Policy, which is a legal philosophy related to transport, in the progress of MaaS policy. As a result, it was revealed that many of the plans did not take into account the maintenance and management of the functions that are emphasized in transport policy. Furthermore, there were very few cases where the construction of the project and the detailed examination of the project through citizen participation were incorporated into the project. Based on these results, we concluded that the Japanese version of MaaS can be considered as ‘Transport Town Planning’ in the conceptual stage, but not in the implementation stage.
