APPLYING SEN’S “CAPABILITY APPROACH” TO THE EVALUATION OF COMMUNITY BUSES

Recently in Japan, many community buses have been provided in both rural areas and urban ones by local governments, in order to enhance mobility of residents, mainly focused on elderly people with poor public transportation services. However, most of them are suffering from fewer passengers and low cost-efficiency. In order to overcome these problems, it is necessary to estimate what kind of effect can be had on the lives of residents, including passengers on community bus services, and evaluate the adequacy for this system. In this paper, the “Capability Approach ” advocated by Amartya Sen is applied to evaluate a community bus service. The main purposes are as follows: 1. To clarify the concept of “Capability ” in the view of travel. 2. To identify the main functions relating to Capability. 3. To develop the evaluation method on Capability incorporating the change of quality of each function corresponding to transportation service change. 4. To apply this method to the evaluation of community bus service