Project Description

Public transport mode share is at a large extent decreasing, regardless of variances across different places and at different urban sizes. Among the few exceptions, Tokyo Metropolitan Area figure as unique, experiencing public transport playing a major and dominant role in metropolitan mobility, as well as requiring less service coverage to achieve similar performance than other megacities, even considering other successful cases like Seoul and Osaka. According to the scarce literature tackling Tokyo’s uniqueness, the majority from Japanese authors, the remarkable performance is essentially a consequence of the use of business diversification strategies to self-promote ridership, a strategy developed exclusively by major and minor railway companies in greatest Japanese metropolitan areas.

The current literature on the factors influencing public transport ridership mostly approach cities and systems which disregard the use of business diversification to improve both ridership and the financial performance. Most studies or tackles a sort of demographics, socioeconomics, internal and external accessibility, or evaluate the effects of the built environment in boosting ridership levels. Nonetheless, there is a consistent agreement among the current causal analysis literature that population and employment density and land-use diversity are positive and significant factors influencing public transport ridership. Both factors are related to either Transit-Oriented Development principles and business diversification strategies.

This PhD research proposal draws an investigation to examine the effects of business diversification on public transport and fill a gap in the current literature. The research is composed of two independent studies tackling some of the business diversification advantages listed in the Japanese literature. The first study uses a diurnal pattern analyse to evaluate business diversification ability to generate morning and afternoon levelled peaks, whereas the second uses a Geographic Weighted Regression to exam the differences between self-promote and independent ridership

Research Team

• Marcelo Altieri
• Cecília Silva (supervisor)
• Shintaro Terabe (co-supervisor)

Financial Support

• FCT - Portuguese Support Institution for Scientific Studies PD/BD/128190/2016

Stage of Progress

• Concluded in 2021