By JUNKI WATANABE/ Staff Writer
August 21, 2024 at 17:22 JST
KUMAMOTO—Teleworking and staggered work hours will be making a comeback at municipal and prefectural governments here, but not due to a COVID-19 flare-up.
Instead, employees will be encouraged to work from home and vary their work schedules to ease traffic congestion aggravated by a new factory operated by Taiwan's top chipmaker.
“The initiative will substantially alleviate congestion during rush hours if it spreads as a popular movement across the prefecture,” said Kumamoto Mayor Kazufumi Onishi.
It is rare for a local government to have employees telework or work staggered shifts as countermeasures against congestion on roads and in trains.
In September, about 4,000 employees of the municipal and prefectural governments, or about 30-40 percent of the total, will work from home or work staggered times daily on a trial basis.
Authorities plan to analyze the initiative’s effects.
An average of 3,000 city employees experimented with teleworking and staggered shifts on a daily basis during the first half of August.
The participants reported reduced commuting times and improved operational efficiency.
Higo Bank, headquartered in Kumamoto, plans to join the initiative of the local governments.
Kumamoto and the surrounding areas suffer from the worst traffic congestion among the 20 major cities designated by a government ordinance, except for the three metropolitan areas around Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.
In Kumamoto, congestion is particularly serious on routes toward its northeastern area, which borders Kikuyo, the town where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chipmaker, opened a factory in February.
Buses often run behind schedule, and trains on the JR Hohi Line, which links Kumamoto with Oita, are overcrowded during morning and evening rush hours.
The Kumamoto municipal and prefectural governments utilized teleworking during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At one time, nearly half of the staff worked from home in some departments.
The teleworking ratio has decreased, partly because the novel coronavirus was downgraded to the same category as seasonal influenza under the infectious diseases control law in May 2023.
To ease traffic congestion, the prefectural government plans to widen national and prefectural roads, review signal controls and extend right-turn lanes.
But many of these infrastructure measures will take several years to complete.
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Roads are chronically congested in central Kumamoto. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
