e pur si muove

This post is a follow up from Public transport and the rich-poor divide, where I have received several insightful comments.

While I would love the idea of an express train service as you suggested, it would require not just an increase in sophistication in train management, but also increase the likelihood of a deadly train crash.

I completely agree that having faster transit must not come at the expense of passenger safety. On the other hand this comment has presented absolutely no evidence to support your claim that express trains are riskier than local trains. Perhaps it is better to be late than to not show up at all, but on the other hand you cannot deny that the economic costs of commute times and congestion are significant and are perfectly rational reasons why people would defect to driving. If we are to have less private vehicles on the road, we have to make sure that people have pretty damn convincing alternatives to make it less attractive to drive. We have done this historically by making the cost of owning cars expensive, but clearly even the additional expense levied through COEs and import taxes are worth it for an increasing group of Singaporeans.

Express trains don’t travel faster than local trains; the idea is just to have express trains make fewer stops. That way you save the time decelerating into a station, waiting on the platform, and accelerating out of the station. It may not sound like much, but skip ten stops and you can easily shave off 15-20 minutes from the trip downtown. In addition, it would be in principle possible to run more services since one no longer has the problem of one slow train holding up all the trains behind. The only thing that would be needed would be additional tracks (if these don’t already exist) that run parallel to the existing local tract so that express trains can skip ahead of local trains while the latter are waiting at a platform.

Express train service is far from a radical, unproven thought; in fact, express train service can be found in virtually every major city and country in the world. New York’s infamous subway system, for example, runs local, express and super-express train service on most of its lines. Yet I have yet to read about a subway crash in NYC, at least in recent years. I think the expertise is widely available and all we need to do is to open ourselves to the possibilities rather than allow our fears of the unknown to close ourselves to all sorts of potentially useful alternatives.

Twenty years ago[...] there existed real express buses […] But ever since the MRT started operating, SBS was required to contribute to “nation building” by making bus travel a less attractive option compared to taking the MRT, which was initially severely underutilised.

I do miss very much having express bus services too. When I lived in Singapore, I stayed in a region that is kinda far away from any reasonable MRT station and it was always easier for me to take the bus home. (I have heard that things have changed since for me, now with the new Circle II line opening… but that is another story.) I also agree that the “scenic tour[s] around housing estates” bus lines are rather ridiculous; on the other hand, I do believe that is how HDB housing estates were planned.

In fact, the current bus situation is commensurate with the current MRT system, in that most bus services are local and everyone is forced to wait through every single intermediate bus stop until the route meanders to the terminal. What we really need is a paradigm shift in how public transport works, and that will require a reworking of the network model that underlies the policy planning. We have now a “one-size-fits-all” model, which made sense when having some kind of public transport service was infinitely better than none at all; now the focus should become one of trying to optimize the user experience; to make public transport not only cheap, but also fast and efficient.

Why do I make such a big deal about this? When Singapore was a developing country, it made sense to pursue the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number; having the least number of mass transit options that covered the most territory makes perfect sense when cost is a paramount issue. Today, we are a much more developed nation with vast reserves: reserves that can be spent wisely in investments that reduce inefficiency and waste. Every minute spent in traffic is a man-minute labor unit lost in productivity; a labor unit that can be ascribed a concrete dollar value in opportunity cost. And the science of network flows has matured very much since then; it is much better understood now that the most effective networks are not the most efficient ones that have as few connections as possible to serve the most nodes. Far from it, the most effective networks tend to be massively redundant, offering many options to get from point A to point B within the transport network. But because not all points have the same importance, the degree of connectedness shouldn’t be constant. Orchard Road should have much more transport options than (say) Pasir Panjang, since the expected traffic to the Orchard Road area is typically far larger. To this extent the suggestion that we should bring back express buses makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t make sense to stop there. The more options the better; that much is already mathematically proven, it’s just a matter of putting the theorems to good use.

P.S. See also the post here and comments within.

The most recent vote counts indicate that the Democrats have wrestled control of the House of Representatives from the war-happy, gun-toting GOP. A clear electoral voice that War Must Go has been heard.

The Senate is still in arrears; the Democrats won Virginia by 8,000 votes, propelling them into tentative control over the Senate as well; expect recounts in short order.

Rumsfeld, the architect of the War on Iraq, quits his job.

Nancy Pelosi is on track to become the first woman Speaker in history.

87% of yesterday’s voters took part via electronic voting; five states reported problems, including swing state Montana.