(Hachinohe City)

Hachinohe City is also promoting the movement of people to central urban areas by enhancing the convenience of bus networks.

A central city in the southeastern part of Aomori Prefecture, Hachinohe has Aoimori Railway and JR Hachinohe Line in service, but its urban public transportation network depends mostly on fixed-route bus services operated municipally by the Hachinohe City Transportation Bureau and privately by Nanbu Bus Co., Ltd. and Towada Kankou Dentetsu Co., Ltd. Bus services in the Hachinohe Station to central urban area section of the Hachinohe Station Line, a trunk line of the urban route bus services, are separately provided by the bus operators according to their own sales policies. As a result, the bus schedules were inconvenient to users, such that, for example, a Nanbu bus would arrive at a given bus stop immediately after a municipal bus had left there and no bus service followed for several tens of minutes thereafter. Discussions were iterated in 2007 with the participation of the bus operators to explore ways to improve the quality of services with emphasis on intelligibility and ease of use. Starting from 2008, a joint bus service schedule running buses at equal intervals of 10 minutes has been launched on the two routes of Hachinohe City and Nanbu bus services. The joint bus operation enabled both operators to cut the number of bus services while grabbing passengers than before, with the result of the bus routes run in joint service turning to profitability (Figure 2-2-24). On the basis of such results with the Hachinohe Station Line, a joint bus service running at equal intervals of 20 minutes has been launched in the section between Hattaro and the central urban area since 2010. Joint bus services running at equal intervals of 10 or 20 minutes have also been implemented on other trunks as well.

Figure 2-2-24

Comparisons of the Number of Passengers at Hachinohe Station after Implementation of a Hachinohe Station Joint Service Operation

Category	Before joint operation service	After joint operation service	Difference	%
Municipal buses	Number of passengers	388	403	15	3.9%
Number of services	75	56	-19	-25.3%
Average number of passengers per service	5.2	7.2	2.0	39.1%
Nanbu buses	Number of passengers	206	282	76	36.9%
Number of services	55	46	-9	-16.4%
Average number of passengers per service	3.7	6.1	2.4	63.7%
Total	Number of passengers	594	685	91	15.3%
Number of services	130	102	-28	-21.5%
Average number of passengers per service	4.6	6.7	2.1	47.0%

Source) Hachinohe Passenger Survey Findings Summary, Hachinohe City Public Transportation Conference

Figure 2-2-25

Source) Itsuki Yoshida, Makoto Chiba (2013): "Exploring the Possibility of Attracting Passenger Traffic by Marking Off Passenger Bus Fars – Positive Analyses in the Hachinohe Self-Sustained Permanent Residence Region.

In the meantime, the Hachinohe Self-Sustained Permanent Residence Region, which is made up of Hachinohe City, with seven surrounding municipalities, started an upper-limit route bus fare program in October 2011 to mark down fares in most sections of the bus services. As a consequence, the number of route bus users (number of fare-paying passengers per weekday) in the Hachinohe region advanced 14.0% from its pre-markdown period (September 2011) one year later and 17.0% two years later (according to the March 2015 issue of Koho Hachihone (“Hachinoho Journal”). Analyses of the breakdowns by route, however, reveal that, over the one-year period, the average passenger density has obviously increased on those routes carrying many services (generally 16 or more a day) but varied on routes carrying less traffic. Some routes had a drastically increased passenger traffic, while others suffered a sizable decline (Figure 2-2-25), which may suggest that the more services a route carries and, hence, the more convenient it is, the more stable the passenger traffic becomes.