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Passenger transport in fiscal 1973 registered a 3.9 per cent increase
in the number of passengers to 27,300 million passengers and a 2.7 per cent
increase in transported passenger-kilometers to 337,600 million passenger-kilometers
over the previous fiscal year.
The breakdown of the above-mentioned increase indicates that the number
of passengers transported by automobiles operated by common operators recorded
a decline of 3.7 per cent to 13,500 million passengers compared with that of
the previous fiscal year, whereas the number of passengers transported by privately
owned automobiles increased 12.7 per cent to 13,800 million passengers. Especially
passengers of privately owned passenger vehicles recorded a continuously sharp
gain of 14.4 per cent over the previous year. However, even in the case of privately
owned passenger vehicles which marked continuous high growth rates in past years,
a trend of a stagnant growth rate occurred in passenger-kilometers since fiscal
1969 as shown in Fig. I-(II)-2, thereby
renecting a decline in average transported kilometers per passenger.
The hitherto sharp increase in the number of privately owned passenger vehicles
posed serious social problems such as air pollution by exhaust gases and, in
addition, became one of the major causes of the decline of public transport
system, because the increase in the number of privately owned passenger vehicles
lowered the travelling efficiency of public transport system like buses by enhancing
the road congestion in cities and caused the decline in transport demand in
regional areas by agravating the existing decline in transport demand resulting
from the decrease in population. (Table
l-(ll)-1)
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