blog
annakat
-ben
Akikonomu
那咱们就抓紧时间慢慢等啊。— 范伟,《马大帅3》 « 语录中国
So then, let’s wait quickly. - Fan Wei « yulu.info
The buzzword “world-class” strikes again, this time attributed to Transport Minister Raymond Lim, who “wants our public transport system to be world-class”, as reported by the New Paper (Chu Chin Leng, November 3, 2006, “Make public transport, not fares, world-class“). The article is a mishmash of suggesting that because the usage of public transport has dropped in the last few years, we should encourage more people to use public transport (including cabinet ministers and the like); and hoping that public transport will not become even more expensive as it becomes more world-class.
Encouraging people to use public transport is fine, but it’s not going to work if people feel that public transport is not a viable option. And for many people, having the system operating close to full capacity during peak hours makes public transport a very unattractive option. Getting more people to ride the MRT is certainly not going to help the congestion problem that shows up during rush hours, with people often having to wait for the next four trains in order to squeeze onto the train, and the ridiculously crowded platforms. And while the frequency of bus services in Singapore is very high (compared to every half-hour, as is the norm here in the US), it’s not going to help if congestion brings commuter traffic to a halt every 100 m and if buses don’t follow the planned timetable, with buses appearing at increasingly random times. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the current state of affairs leaves some to want to switch modes of transport.
And this world-class thing… well, Singapore’s public transport really is world-class already. Very few cities could boast a ridership of 63%. And not many other cities have nice, clean public subway systems. Just to cite three, London’s Underground has no air-conditioning, New York’s is really loud and stinks of pee, and Paris’ Metro goes on strike way too often. (The train system in Japan, however, is second to none. And what I’ve heard about South Korea seems very impressive too.) In that sense, we should not be trying to push toward some hypothetical best case of 100% usage (that’s NOT going to happen), but instead think harder about how we can improve the usability of our existing system.
It’s not too hard to think how either. One simple way is to empower the commuter. One of the biggest disadvantages of the bus system is that the buses themselves are at the whim of traffic conditions on the road. A single car crash can bring traffic to a halt several kilometers upstream. The problem is not so much of commuters ending up waiting forever for bus service, as that commuters don’t know they have to wait forever for their bus to come. Having some kind of GPS-tracking system for buses and a bulletin board with information (or even a hotline to call for information) would be enormously helpful for commuters in figuring out whether it’s worth their trouble to wait for the bus, or whether it’s more expedient to call for a taxi.
Another way is simply to run the trains more strategically. It’s quite a joke, really, that the MRT system is entirely local, in that every train stops at every station. Virtually any other sane rail system has a litany of trains running from local to superexpress. Imagine if you’re trying to take the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto and it has to stop at every dinky little town in between and every minor train station in the outskirts of the cities. Having a very fast train won’t help very much there. Likewise in Singapore, when the train bound for downtown is completely full by the time it’s at Jurong, there’s little point stopping to pick up more passengers in Queenstown. Express trains would help enormously in cutting down both congestion and transit time, with stops only at select stations (e.g. A rush-hour train servicing Pasir Ris - Simei, and then running nonstop all the way to Bugis, City Hall, Raffles Place, and then nonstop to Buona Vista). Perhaps the only question is one of planning and coordinating all the various train services, and furthermore making sure that express trains can bypass local trains if necessary. This may not be possible without building additional infrastructure such as shunt rails and more signals, but there are concrete benefits in having a more sophisticated train system.
Perhaps one of the reasons why our public transport system is the way it is is because the people who manage it don’t use it, and hence don’t understand some of its idiosyncracies. One of the fundamental ironies of public transport is that while it is predominantly the wealthy who have the power to change it, it is predominantly the poor who have no choice but to use it. In this sense the public transport is iconic of the variegated changes that have taken place in our society: commuters appear to have stratified themselves into the MRT/bus-users vs. car-users, just as our society is developing a class-structure of the haves vs. the have-nots. One of the important questions we will have to address is how we can encourage a egalitarian society to form, not a more stratified one.
I will end with a quote from Lucky Tan’s post “Solution to Elitism = Inclusive Society”
Someone told me inclusive society means Nobody will be left behind. [...] I thought long and hard about this inclusive society…..and realised it probably means : if you’re a nobody, you will be left behind.
P.S. Chin Leng apparently also blogs as redbean at My Singapore News. The post on his blog has a significantly different tone from the published version; how much of it is due to editing on the author’s part and how much of it by the New Paper is unknown.
