"The Special Measures Act for Public Use of Deep Underground" was issued in April 2001 in Japan. The deep underground space is required to be used appropriately and rationally in consideration with characters of facilities. The superiority of the deep underground use in economic rationality over the shallow underground use is studied quantitatively in this paper with a case study on urban railway. A reasonable measure of the priority judgement on conflicting facilities is also proposed.

The Full Local Transport Plans (LTPs) were produced by the end of July 2000 for each local authority in England. It was also emphasized in the Guidance on Full Local Transport Plan that local authorities should actively involve local people, business, transport operators, users, health and educational and environmental organizations at an early stage in drawing up their LTPs.

This study focuses on Public Involvement on the Local Transport Plans and aims to investigate how public involvement and the local transport planners of the U.K. have taken public opinions into consideration and to examine how these aspects can be implemented in Japan.

The EU's Cohesion Fund , PHARE and its successor ISPA have been playing a vital role in promoting integration process through assisting betterment of transport infrastructure in the Member States and the Candidate Countries respectively. In order to assess their actual functioning and contribution to the regional development, I looked into three projects supported by the above-mentioned schemes; construction of a new airport and two underground railway lines in Athens and improvement of road network in Hungary.