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From The Newspaper (37) 　Bus Service

June 15th, 2023

He worked at a tourism information center at the station once or twice a month. The station is located in the heart of his city. His city is middle-sized, and is situated in the northern part of Japan. For tourists he gave information about sightseeing spots in and around his city. Tourists varied from the nation to foreign tourists. This city, and the surrounding cities, towns and villages have various types of resources for tourism: old castle cites, shrines, temples, merchants' houses, etc. as well as traditional craftworks like dying, lacquer-ware, iron-ware, etc. The area also is abundant in rich nature. Mountains in which people can enjoy hiking, viewing colorful leaves, ski resorts, and hot-springs thanks to volcanos. As he was able to introduce those resources to various tourists from all over Japan, he was happy and felt rewarded. But, sometimes, if he wanted to explain about access to those areas, he sometimes felt uneasiness because public transportation to those places were sometimes poor. From his experience, travelers don't like to use a taxi often. They want to use trains, buses, even rental bikes. This city has a loop bus service for tourists. Two types of loop buses, a regular-sized area loop bus and a broader area loop bus, which go clockwise and counter clockwise regularly. The fees are relatively cheap. But if you want to go to the places out of those two loops, he had to say that the bus services were relatively poor. Sometimes, travelers have to wait for the next bus for a long time. They even need to give up going there because of few bus services. And, while he has been working the counter for several years, this situation has been steadily becoming worse, because of less bus services due to cost reasons and the lack of drivers. He recently read an article in a newspaper about a new bus service strategy in another prefecture. The title was, "Local bus, passengers increase by increasing bus services." The subtitle was, "Change the way of thinking worked." "Shonai Kotsu, a bus company in Tsuruoka City in Yamagata prefecture, has decided to increase the number of bus services, which has resulted in a dramatic increase of passengers. Because of the decreasing population of the area, when the number of users of buses had reached a ceiling, they changed their bus size to a smaller size to make it more customer-convenient, this is called 'reversal thinking', which earned new demand for bus services. Before the number of bus services in downtown was 12 times using 25 types of passenger buses. From October 2022, the city started to use station wagon cars and increased the rides to 48 times ~ four times as many as before. They set the routes more convenient, smaller cars can go on narrower roads. They also increased the bus stops from 58 to 79. 'Shonai Kotsu' announced that the number of passengers from October 2022 to March 2023 were about 29,000 people, which was three times more compared to the same term of the previous year. Before their revision, the numbers of customers every year were always about 20,000. It means that after only one year, passengers of the half year had already exceeded the estimated number for the year. One of the main purposes of the new policy was to keep elderly people from driving. The company issued commuting passes to elderly people over 70 and to those who gave up their driving license. Tsuruoka City subsidizes 75% of the pass for its citizens." He read the same article in another newspaper. Maybe reporters of the articles hoped that this method will spread in their cities. Another article also picked up a voice of an elderly guy saying that before he would ask his relative to drive him, now he gets on the bus almost every day and it has become rather convenient, the opportunities when he could go out has increased. He sometimes saw buses going with few passengers in his city. They are regular sized buses. Maybe they consume more gas. For gas mileage, smaller buses are rather better. Maybe to obtain driver licenses is easier for smaller buses' than regular ones'. He hoped that bus services in his city will increase so it will be easier to introduce various sightseeing places to go.

No. 524



*vary :異なる、多様である
*dying :染め物
*lacquer-ware :漆器
*iron-ware :鉄器
*abundant :豊富な
*rewarded :報われた
*clockwise :時計回り
*counter clockwise :反時計回り
*due to :ために
*resulted in :結果となる
*reversal thinking :逆転の発想
*revision :改訂
*keep A from driving :Aに運転させないようにする
*subsidize :補助する
*gas mileage :燃費
*obtain :取得する