yax-836 Are planned bus and rail improvements enough?

Yawning Bread. 4 February 2008

Are the planned bus and rail improvements enough?

Transport Minister Raymond Lim made two speeches recently outlining his ministry's plans for public transport improvements. The overall direction appears sound, but as with all these things, execution is going to be a critical factor. This especially as the plans are long-term, and it's very common in politics to change strategy mid-stream.

His overall goal had been set out much earlier, in a speech to Parliament on 9 March 2007. [1]

My aim is to make public transport more attractive, no longer positioned as merely catering to a captive market of those who have no other means of transport, but to win over those who do have alternatives. We must make public transport attractive to this group of "non-customers", so that significant numbers would choose public transport because they find it to be convenient, reliable and offering far better value for money than private transport.

[snip]

We have set ourselves a target of raising the public transport share of all morning peak hour trips from the current 63% to at least 70% by 2020.

-- Raymond Lim, 9 March 2008, Speech to Parliament.

The bus system

Bus stuck in traffic

On 18 January 2008, he provided some specifics about policy changes regarding buses. Essentially, his ministry will take back control of route planning from the 2 bus companies, and set higher service standards.

He began by noting commuters' common complaints: "Long waits. Erratic bus arrivals. Circuitous feeders. Overcrowded buses."

Commuters have also asked for more point-to-point buses "because transfers are inconvenient; the waiting time for each leg adds up, and the total journey time is much too long."

However, Lim is standing by the present hub-and-spoke system.

Let me illustrate the difference between the two approaches. Let us take 20 origins and 20 destination points with a hub in the centre. With a hub-and-spoke system, you will have 20 buses going into the hub from the origins and 20 buses leaving the hub to the destinations, or 40 bus services to run this system. Take away the hub, replace it with direct services, and you will need 400 bus services.

-- Raymond Lim, 18 January 2008. Speech [2]

This analysis is correct. Hub-and-spoke arrangements potentially provide better resource utilisation unless the traffic between 2 points is large enough to justify direct routing. However, transport planners must ensure that the lengthened journey distances and interconnection times that are inherent in hub-and-spoke do not impact commuters severely. In other words, a 10-minute wait for a direct route may be acceptable, but 10-minute waits at the hub for each main and feeder service (plus the longer route taken) are not. This is one of the details that are too often forgotten. The Transport Ministry has to be alert to this.

My guess is that at the hub, feeder bus services need to leave at 3 to 5-minute intervals to be truly satisfactory, even during off-peak, with mainline services achieving 10-minute headways without fail.

Fortunately, the minister seems aware of how far we are from meeting such a service standard.

This has led to a situation where out of more than 250 bus services, only 35% are run at intervals of 10 minutes or less. Some even run at intervals longer than 30 minutes.

-- ibid

The solution, he announced, was for the Land Transport Authority (LTA) which comes under his ministry, to undertake route planning from next year on. This should be an improvement over the current system, where the 2 bus companies do their own route planning. As commercial entities, they have been more motivated to reduce frequency and design circuitous routes in the areas where they have monopolies, in order to maximise profit.

Lim also set out numerical targets which we should keep at hand to measure future performance.

By 2015, our target is for 80% of public transport commuters to complete their journeys within an hour, from the point they set off, to arriving at their destination, up from 71% today. We will narrow the gap between public transport and car journey times. By 2020, journeys on public transport should not take more than 1.5 times that by car, a reduction from the current 1.7 times.... At least 80% of bus services must be run at peak frequencies of 10 minutes or less by August 2009, compared with 15 minutes today.

-- ibid

In future, the LTA will tender out packages of routes that they have planned, and there ought to be a more competitive market for the routes.

There are limited economies of scale for bus operations above a fleet size of 500 buses. Hence, our current bus industry of about 3,700 buses could potentially support more than the current two operators.

-- ibid

Another issue Lim addressed was that of bus priority lanes. Indeed there should be more of these, but his ministry must also deal with the way in which left-turning cars are allowed to filter into bus lanes, thus defeating the whole purpose of bus lanes. Orchard Road is a prime example of the mess that results. This is a major reason why bus services can't run to schedule, yet the minister does not seem to have a ready solution for it.

To be fair, I suspect this is not an issue that can be solved by the Transport Ministry alone. It may well be a town planning question. We may have to require that no building can have any driveway accessed from a major road, so that the question of cars and taxis filtering into a bus lane to turn into the building should never have to arise.

The metro system

A week later, Lim spoke about the rail network. He announced the decision to build two more metro lines by 2020 -- the Thomson line and the Eastern Region Line. This is in addition to the Circle Line and the Downtown Line, work on which is in progress. On completion of all these projects, our rail density should, at last, be comparable to cities like New York and London, and surpassing Hong Kong and Tokyo, he promised.

In the short term,

Train ridership is increasing steadily and commuters have said that they are feeling the squeeze, especially on the North-South and East-West lines.... LTA closely monitors the passenger loading on our trains. To ensure a more comfortable ride for commuters, LTA has worked with the train operators to run 93 additional train trips per week during the morning and evening periods from February 2008 on the North-South East-West and the North-East lines. For commuters, this will mean less crowded trains and a reduction in waiting time by about 10-15% during peak hours.

Beyond that, we will also expand the carrying capacity of the North-South and East-West Lines. We will be working with SMRT to purchase more trains and address infrastructure constraints so that peak hour train frequencies can be increased. When completed in about 4 years’ time, carrying capacity will be increased by a further 15%.

-- Raymond Lim, 25 January 2008, Speech [3]

A 15% increase in capacity (during peak periods only?) over 4 years does not sound like much, and I envisage that the crowding problem will not go away but may in fact worsen.

Cut services, increase profit

An example of transport operators reducing capacity to help their bottom line, albeit relating to a rail operator (SMRT) rather than a bus operator, can be seen in a letter to the editor from Aaron Thng, published in the Straits Times on 29 January 2008.

In this letter, Aaron noted that "The SMRT annual report for 2007 raises some questions about our rail system. There has been growth in the number of train journeys, from 394.3 million passenger trips in 2003 to 434.9 million passenger trips last year, a growth of about 10 per cent. Also, average operating car occupancy has risen from 55.7 persons to 68.6 persons during the same period, a 23 per cent rise. However, the total car kilometres operated last year was 77.1 million, a 14 per cent fall from 2003, when that statistic was 89.6 million."

"SMRT's operating profit has grown by 52 per cent since 2003," he added for good measure.

The SMRT's reply was published on 1 February 2008. It said, "Our train services are planned based on travel demand, the carrying capacity of trains, and the time required to call at each station for passengers to alight and board. Over the years, SMRT has increased train service frequencies during peak and off-peak hours for both the East-West and North-South lines."

"Since 2004, the number of train trips operated per week during peak hours has increased. For instance, in 2004, more than 50 train trips were added per week, and in 2006, more than 75 train trips were added per week. Last year, SMRT added more than 15 train runs per week to improve service frequency during off-peak hours."

So how does one account for Aaron Thing's point that car kilometres fell 14 percent between 2003 and 2007?

The SMRT clarified that they "adjusted train services along the East-West Line in 2003 to better serve our passengers."

"In the adjustment, the direct train service from Boon Lay Station to Changi Airport Station was replaced with a shuttle train service between Tanah Merah and Changi Airport stations, which led to the reduction in total train kilometres operated."

In other words, they replaced a long route with a very short route. The number of services remained the same, or even increased, but the kilometres were reduced.

Is that serving passengers better, as the letter claimed? I would think not, because the erstwhile Boon Lay to Changi service didn't only serve passengers going to the airport, but lots of other passengers moving around along the stretch unrelated to the airport. Reducing the service to a mere shuttle service between Tanah Merah Station and Changi effectively deprived these commuters of those services.

My feeling is that the government is now playing catch-up after a period of under-investment in rail transport from the mid 1990s to the present time. Perhaps they had been shocked at how costly the Northeast line was -- it was the first time they had designed an all-underground system -- and the underutilisation of a few stations, e.g. Buangkok.

Paya Lebar Station late at night

But now that the system is generating a different kind of complaint -- that of overcrowding -- they find that the lead time to providing solutions is long indeed.

This is the result of having given themselves incorrect terms of reference for too long. The desire to see public transport as purely commercial enterprises has led them to forget the social aims that should be served. Underinvestment is now bearing political costs.

Singaporeans too intolerant of crowding?

It is constantly reiterated that other cities seem to complain less even though they face more severe crowding on the trains. Why are Singaporeans so intolerant of the squeeze?

This calls for a separate essay – because it's not a hardware question anymore, but a social one.

Even now, I'm not sure they truly grasp what is needed. If, as the minister himself said, public transport must be made attractive enough to win motorists over, then it is important to realise that just coping with crowding through incremental improvements isn't going to be enough. There has to be, I suspect, a period of noticeable over-capacity in the public transport system, both in terms of space and frequency, for enough of a comfort factor to entice motorists over. Nowhere in the minister's plans is there any attempt to provide this over-capacity. This being the case, I wonder if the aim to get motorists to switch will be realised at all.

The problem of financing

Yet over-capacity has undeniable costs. Raymond Lim himself indicated in his speech of 25 January that new financing models have to be found for all these desired improvements. What more of the massive expansion that my suggested goal of comfort and over-capacity?

One notable fact is that compared to, say, Europe, Singapore's bus and metro fares are unusually low. In major European cities, fares are easily 3 or 4 times ours. Thus, in Singapore, there just isn't enough revenue to support sufficient capacity for comfort. At current fares, our public transport system needs volume -- and that invariably means crowding -- to obtain enough revenue to operate.

Yet, raising fares is not a politically acceptable solution. Why is this so, when our GDP per capita is approaching that of Europe? Might it have something to do with the rich-poor income gap? If, despite average GDP per capita being in roughly the same league, the poorer half of Singaporeans have much lower income than the poorer half of Europeans, then naturally, the public transport commuter in Singapore can never afford the same fares that the European commuter pays daily.

So here again, our public transport question may be in hock to a larger question of economic policy. Our readiness to live with a wide income divide and our reluctance to think in terms of wealth transfer taxation, makes it very hard to finance social programs, whether health or transport, that befits our aspirations.

Hence, despite the commitment of Raymond Lim to improve public transport in Singapore, the issue may in fact be bigger than his portfolio.

Road toll increases

In a third speech on 30 January 2008 [4], Raymond Lim announced increases in electronic tolls for congested roads. This is another part of his plan to get more motorists to switch to public transport.

The increased cost of motoring will kick in very quickly, but the capacity increases in public transport will take years to realise.

The sequencing of push and pull is thus not coordinated. Motorists are being pushed into public transport by price increases before there is any "pull" factor (convenience).

Footnotes

Addenda

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