A FIELD EXPERIMENT OF MOBILE PHONE BASED TRANSIT (BUS) INFORMATION PROVISION SYSTEM

Toyota city has great deal of automobile usage, which occupies 64 percent of whole purpose of transportation. This shows that there is high dependence on automobiles compared to other large cities like Tokyo and Osaka. And because many automobile-related factories, as the main industry of the city and is headed by Toyota Motor Corporation, are located separately all around the city, it is now common that automobiles are used for commuting. Owing to such automobile-dependent transportation structure, various transportation problems, such as continuous traffic congestion in the central city and around the big factories and the increase of traffic accidents, are getting unveiled. Also in the long term, the society needs appropriate functional allocation of automobile usage and public transportation usage, arrangement of public transportation supporting daily lives of rural people, and establishment of public transportation that any citizen can use comfortably, from the point of realization of the humankind city. Based on the context above, 'Fureai' bus, as an example of public transportation supporting daily lives of rural people, has been under the operation since last October in collaboration with the local community, transportation enterprises and the local government Toyota city. 'Fureai' bus operation was introduced in the southwestern part of the city that covers 19 kilometers square and more than 23,000 residents, and has 5 routes with 1 or 2 buses an hour respectively. But the bus operation, which is greatly influenced by the traffic congestion and bad weather like rain and storm, is difficult to keep the schedule regular. Therefore passengers have to get the bus stops early to wait for the bus. The way of increasing passengers is to relieve such the obstacle. The experiment was solving this problem by providing positioning information and estimated bus stop arrival time information of Fureai bus through internet-ready cellular phone. By providing such kinds of information, user services will be improved, which will reduce waiting time for bus and will relieve users' impatience. This experiment aimed at improving user satisfaction for a short term, and promoting utilization of public transportation for a long term.