Bus stops blow up" and "fall off the road" Loose social networking and not-so-loose environment of "Coastal Bus" supporting northern transportation infrastructure.｜Domingo

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Bus stops blow up" and "fall off the road" Loose social networking and not-so-loose environment of "Coastal Bus" supporting northern transportation infrastructure.

2023.12.26

Living

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Enbetsu Town Toyotomi Town Haboro Town

Coastal Bus, which operates the "Limited Express Haboro," based in the Hokkaido town of Haboro and linking Sapporo with Rumoi, Haboro, and Toyotomi, is known to have a lot of fans for its entertaining and informal posts on its website. The Coastal Bus has posted an unusual post about its winter service, and it has become a topic of conversation.

[Notice.
Regarding transportation disruptions during the winter. This account may dare to use local language (dialect) and graphic words to express the actual situation.

沿岸バス

Quote from @enganbus's post.

Some of the expressions introduced here are somewhat imaginative, such as "stuck in the road" and "falling off the road," while others, such as "the road is pooing," might raise a question mark in the minds of non-locals, and "the bus stop is blowing up" might be an example, but the meaning is the same. In each case, we can clearly see that Coastal Bus is trying to operate its buses under the most severe conditions.

What is the true meaning of the "blown up" and "stuck" bus stops?

Domingo spoke with Coastal Bus about how they post on social networking sites.

We try to use standard Japanese in our daily PR activities, but in times of emergency, such as disasters, we use local dialects and other localized words, and in some cases, we also use Internet terms.

While rough and trite expressions like this are used in X, there are also some that they dare not use.

We try to avoid expressions such as "isolated island on land" and "once in X years," which the media tends to use, as much as possible.

The reason for this, he told us, is that "an isolated island on land" can be misinterpreted to mean that lifelines such as electricity, water, and gas have been cut off, and "once in a year" is because a snow storm of the same scale occurred a few days after this expression was used in the past.

Operating a bus route in Hokkaido in winter is very tough!

Coastal Bus's main business area, Rumoi District, has no railroads, so buses are the main means of transportation for local residents. Therefore, when the bus service is cancelled due to heavy snow or snow storms, the local municipalities, schools, boards of education, and tourist associations are notified, and local schools are sometimes encouraged to take the bus early to get out of school, even in the middle of classes.

One of our biggest concerns with winter operations is getting stuck en route. Most recently, the operation was abandoned in February 2018 due to a ground blizzard on Route 232. We spent the night on the road until help arrived the next morning.

Why is Coastal Bus working so hard to transmit the information on X? The reason goes back to the Great East Japan Earthquake. With electricity and other infrastructure cut off, we were strongly impressed by the way the disaster victims used Twitter to communicate their current situation, which led us to begin full-scale operations. In addition to the daily operation status that supports the daily lives of the local community, at the time of the Hokkaido Bold Earthquake, information on power outages and the expected resumption of operations was also provided.


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