Heijitsu daiya (weekday schedule)

The operating plan applied on weekdays, Monday through Friday. Service is built up heavily in the morning and evening to match commuting and school travel. Take care: a public holiday normally runs on the holiday schedule even though it falls on a weekday.

What heijitsu daiya means

The weekday schedule is the operating plan applied on weekdays, Monday through Friday. A bus schedule is normally drawn up separately for different days of the week, and this is the one built for weekdays, when commuting and school travel are concentrated. It applies on more days of the year than any other, making it the basic schedule of the set. Service is thickened through the morning and evening rush and spaced out more widely during the middle of the day, an arrangement that follows the flow of people on a weekday. That is why the interval can vary so much across the day on one and the same route.

Watch out for weekdays that are not on the weekday schedule

What you gain from knowing this term is the ability to spot the exceptional days. Public holidays are generally operated on the holiday schedule even though the calendar calls them weekdays. Some operators also draw up special schedules over the New Year period and the Obon season. The mishap of "I went to the stop expecting an ordinary Monday, and it was a public holiday with fewer buses" comes from not knowing about these exceptions. Substitute holidays, observed on the Monday when a public holiday falls on a Sunday, are normally treated on the holiday side in the same way.

Anyone who takes the same trip every day for work or school should be especially careful on a public holiday morning. It is not only that the bus fails to appear at your usual time; the time of the very first departure of the day may itself be later. If you have to be at work on a holiday, the safe approach is to check the holiday schedule times the evening before and leave home ready to take a bus one departure earlier than usual.

How to confirm it on the timetable

Timetables at bus stops are normally divided into weekday, Saturday and holiday columns. The weekday column often sits at the far left or across the top, but there is no rule about it, so always check the heading of the column. Even at a stop you know well, a schedule revision can change how the columns are laid out, so on a route you have not used for a while it is safer to read it as if for the first time. Confirm at the same time whether the day you are traveling is a public holiday and you will never read the wrong column. How Saturdays are treated varies from route to route, so the assumption that "Saturday will be the same as a weekday" is one to avoid as well. The specific steps for reading a timetable are covered in our article on how to read a bus timetable.