The subway is an important means of public transport system in the city, supporting the livelihood of citizens, promoting regional development, activating the city and enhancing the city functions. In addition, as subway is mostly constructed under the road, effective utilization of land is attained and it does not produce much noise nor affect the urban landscape.
So subway is suitable for urban development and promoted worldwide as an attractive system. However, the subway construction requires large sums of money and long-term planning and the development of subway in each city is rather slow due to rising construction costs or route setting in recent years.
Therefore, low cost subway in accordance with the transport demand is required and a linear motor driven system, "Linear Metro" has been developed.
Today we have subways in 10 major cities in Japan with 11 operators and subway development will be continuing for the future. On the other hand, in the regional hub cities, traffic congestion in the city center is intense with an increase in automobile traffic and the environment is degraded due to the exhaust gas and noise. To cope with these problems, the introduction of public transport has been studied. However there are various problems such as what system has to be constructed or route setting or acquisition of construction funds
As a result of the practical research for three years from Fiscal 1985, we confirmed that low-cost subway "Linear Metro" that has been developed as a public transport is suitable for regional hub city as a semi-main metropolitan line or branch line. For this reason, in order to promote the construction of linear motor driven metro in the regional hub cities as well as metropolitan cities, the Japan Subway Association (Hereinafter referred to as the "Association") established the "linear Metro Promotion Headquarters" within the association in October 1988. We are considering the introduction of Linear Metro as a public transport not only in the ordinance-designated cities but also other cities where the construction of public transport is considered or expected in the future.