Icheon City Wins Grand Prize at 'Gyeonggi Province Proactive Administration Excellence Competition'

[Suwon Ilbo=Eom In-yong Reporter] Icheon City announced on the 25th that it won the grand prize for 'Public Transportation Renaissance! Innovative City Bus Restructuring' at the 'Gyeonggi Province Proactive Administration Excellence Competition' held at the Gyeonggi Province Art Center Convention Hall.

The competition, held from June 16 to July 18, selected 18 cases confirmed by the Gyeonggi Province Proactive Administration Committee through written review from a total of 72 cases—29 from local governments and 43 from public institutions within Gyeonggi Province. These 18 cases underwent online review by the provincial citizen participation panel, and the final 4 groups of local governments and public institutions received the honor of being awarded.

Icheon City received high scores in citizen satisfaction, task difficulty, scalability, creativity, and expertise. The city's achievement in calculating appropriate bus numbers through data-based analysis of city bus demand, implementing phased and continuous city bus route restructuring by region, resolving public transportation inconvenience, improving transportation profitability, and reducing total city bus quantity to achieve 500 million won in annual budget savings received high evaluation.

In particular, improvements to city bus numbering to enhance citizen recognition and the restructuring of Hopetaxi and Ttok Bus linked with city buses are interpreted as having heightened citizen satisfaction.

Starting from the second half of last year, Icheon City organized 22 bus routes in 2 regions (Janghowon and Yul) where Ttok Bus was introduced, achieving 200 million won in budget savings. In the first half of this year, the city consolidated or merged a total of 47 routes over 3 phases and promoted restructuring of 13 city bus routes with high citizen demand.

Meanwhile, in November, the city will compete with national excellence cases at the '2025 National Proactive Administration Excellence Competition' jointly hosted by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, the Human Resources Development Service, and the Office of Government Coordination.

Mayor Kim Kyung-hee stated, "We plan to enhance the efficiency of areas located in the downtown area that had been relatively neglected, and deploy 2 replacement city buses to operate student commute shuttle buses for the Bufal-Jeungpo and Baeksa-Sindun regions for students who are vulnerable to public transportation during a trial run in October."