This paper attempts to examine the forming bus transport services supply system by various operators after a municipal merger, a case study on Miyoshi in Hiroshima Prefecture. Miyoshi is a mountainous-hilly area and it is a low public transport demand area. Therefore the public transport systems run in the red. After the municipal merger in 2004, several bus transport services were combined in order to provide services to as wide an area as possible. Small bus transport services, community buses and demand-responsive-transport (DRT) within mountainous areas, are being used to augment the core bus services, which in general don’t reach outlying areas. And the municipality did integration and standardization of bus routes etc. for helping to maintain the level of services. However this integration comes at a cost. The municipality has to bear the financial burden of supplying services to and from outlying hamlets, in addition to the outsourcing of community buses within the municipality. Also the municipality is maintaining the private bus company’s ability to operate through the provision subsidies and segregation of bus routes (maintain longstanding anti-competition measures). In addition to this, the municipality has created a public-private-partnership(PPP) with community groups utilizing DRT. Above all, in order to maintain bus transport services in mountainous-hilly areas, the service operator combination we see today in post-merger Miyoshi been created by the municipality bringing together various operators.
View full abstract