Kochi prefecture has been tackling various ITS-related social field experiments in the entire prefecture and been selected as one of the ITS model areas by the national government. This paper describes a bus-on-demand project, called Nakamura Machi (City) Bus, conducted at downtown Nakamura City, a local core city located at the western part of the prefecture surrounded by mountainous areas, between April and June 2000. Through the project, the prefecture developed an effective bus operating system meeting with users' requests (i.e., demand) based upon ITS technologies. The experiment has verified that bus-on-demand system is effective for rural areas since, with almost the same operation resources as it was before the field test, it gained four times more users and a good reputation.
Abstract