Research On Financial Subsidy Mechanism Of Urban Public Transport

City bus plays an important role in promoting urban economic development and social harmony and decreasing urban traffic pressure. The State Council issued Circular No.64-Instructions by the State Council on Giving Priority to Developing Urban Public Transportation in 2012. Giving priority to developing public transportation would continue to be a national strategy and become a consensus within the whole society. In the process of rapid urbanization, modernization and mechanization, we are faced with both the pressure from urban traffic congestion and the problem of atmospheric environmental pollution. One solution is to vigorously develop city bus so that the ordinary people can give preference to public transportation, thus effectively improving the travel pattern and farther guiding the purchase and use of cars. City bus is a public service project that concerns the people’s wellbeing, has a spillover effect, and serves the interests of society City bus enterprises have the problem that they cannot make ends meet due to such factors as rapidly increasing cost, insufficient fiscal subsidies, low ticket price operation and excessive public welfare burdens. In such a context, we should not implement complete marketization of city bus. It is necessary for the government to provide city bus with subsidies as a visible hand, which is an important measure to promote the performance of the positive exterior properties of city bus and its normal development.In recent years, Yinchuan municipal government has provided city bus with great financial and policy supports by appropriating a certain amount of fiscal subsidies. Although the city bus subsidy system has experienced many reforms, there remains no unified standard comprehensive subsidy utility. Furthermore, the current city bus subsidy system has the problems of difficulty in delineating the subsidy range, single source of subsidies, and lack of reasonable and effective appraisal mechanism. In the end it comes down to the problem of the motivation and restriction of subsidy. These problems would lead to the difficulty in reasonably determining the specific amount of subsidy by the government, low efficiency in tax utilization, as well as over excessive dependence of city bus enterprises on the government, which discourages these enterprises to improve their own business performance and goes against their healthy development. The objective of the present study is to propose the policies and strategies for improving the city bus subsidy system of Yinchuan city in order to promote the healthy development of city bus in the city and provide reference for the official issue of the Implementation Scheme for City Bus Enterprises Cost Regulation of Yinchuan City. Since its trial implementation in 2013, the Implementation Scheme for City Bus Enterprises Regulation of Yinchuan City (For Trial Implementation) has entered into the stage that requires adjustments before releasing the official implementation scheme in 2016. First, the paper analyzes the practices of city bus subsidy in relevant cities at home and aboard, and then draws lessons that can be used for reference for Yinchuan City; second, based on the analyses of the current operation of city bus in Yinchuan City, the current subsidy system and its existing problems, the author puts forward several policies and measures to improve the current subsidy system, including setting up a special regulative department, improving the legal system, delineating the range of subsidies, establishing subsidy assessment indicators, improving the corresponding incentive mechanism and so on; finally, the author proposes several mechanisms that can be used for reference for the city bus subsidy of Yinchuan City.