earticle

영어

Public transportation is essential for citizens’ traveling. However, private bus companies are not willing to establish new routes if they are not guaranteed some revenues by running the new bus lines even if some citizens are excluded from bus service areas. This is especially true of small-medium sized cities where the density of demand population is much lower. Nevertheless, it is necessary to provide public transit services as a type of indispensable public goods for citizens’ daily life regardless of the possibility of generating profits. Furthermore, due to the constraints of the resources available to service provision in monetary terms for both local agencies and bus companies, it is critical to improve the overall serviceability without requiring considerable additional costs. For this reason, reforming the local bus routing system without any significant investment for setting up new routes is necessary. This study aims at investigating serviceability improvement effects derived from reforming the city bus route system by analyzing some upward changes in terms of the number of citizens contained in the reformed system. The analysis is made in the framework of GIS in such a way that the numbers of citizens who can access the services before and after the reform are compared. The city of Chungju, located in Chungbuk Province, which is an example of a small-medium sized city in South Korea, was selected as the study area for the empirical analysis. According to the analysis results, the bus route reform in the study area improved the overall serviceability in that it contained more service recipients after the reform. Furthermore, it turns out that the overall bus running time also decreased in the reformed route system.