What's the search for local free buses?

[Shannon Jacobs]

Rather a shame to break the stillness, and seems unlikely many eyeballs will ever be cast this way, but...

What's the best search to find local free buses?

Background is that there's a local free shuttle bus from a big shopping mall to one of the local stations. Quite convenient and I use it pretty often, but it got me to wondering about other buses that might exist. The obvious searches like 無料のバス are obviously failing since they don't even return the one I know about.

Suggestions?

(Yeah, get a bicycle, but it's the parking...)

[CL]

You probably need to reverse your thinking and go to the website of the
place you want to visit and then click on the "Access" (or "アクセス" link).
Also, if you Google a specific station, they usually have destination
+ price information for every bus that stops at every numbered stop
around the station.

HTH

--
CL

[Shannon Jacobs]

Hark! Is that a tree falling in the distant forest? Or the wail of a retired lumberjack?

Can't reverse my thinking that way, because I don't know where I'm going exactly and I'm willing to walk some of the way. Actually, my walking target is still 10,000 paces per day, so I don't even want to get too close to my various destinations.

Your price-inversion idea seemed more promising, but I haven't been able to make it work so far. I do have a solid example (of a free bus) to work from, but it fell flat on many Japanese searches. There are several webpages with various lists of buses. I focused my search on the station that is the terminus for the free bus I know about, but that particular bus doesn't appear on any of the lists... I was hoping to find it there and see how the free status was indicated, but most of the lists don't seem to have any fare information. The example bus is a regular municipal bus, but apparently it's regarded as some kind of special charter route and therefore doesn't really count.

[John W.]

I've not seen a "clearinghouse" of that sort of information. Japan-Guide.com has a few things; sometimes their forums can be dated information, though. Google brought this up, which is cool:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gail-nakada/tour-tokyos-best-sightsee_b_2946331.html

Otherwise, you're at a point-to-point search on Google to see if the bus fare is 0 or greater than 0.

John W.