Fare systems
To what extent can changing the price tag help bring users back?
With the amount of companies allegedly giving up the space they occupy in the CBD, and yet more companies choosing to endorse a hybrid work model, we can in general expect the use of public transport to decrease. This is in addition to the current moral panics of both public transport reliability, as well as being with other people on the same vehicle — a concern many worldwide transit organizations also face.
Are there ways around it, though? The way I see it, the current fare system does not necessarily lend itself well to the kind of discretionary trip one might occasionally take. Driving such random trips, mostly taken off peak, is not just a matter of adding more trains as some might think; the fare system needs to also be priced for that reality.
Competition
The rise of private-hire vehicles also means cheap, venture-capital subsidized rides can be easily available at the touch of a button, even if Grab is nevertheless raising their fares; why they would do it, I leave it to your imagination. Yes, I mean what I said — Uber, for one, is noticeably burning cash in the hopes that one day they can get rid of the driver. And that day, is not today.
It’s quite fair to say that this caught the government unaware much like how the bicycle-sharing bubble burst — by the time the legislative infrastructure kept up, bicycle-sharing had already fallen out of fashion. The current situation also means that people are starting to question the financial upsides of being a private hire driver anyway, so we might be seeing another bust on the horizon. Even so, while there is the possibility that reduced personal disposable income, as an effect of the current economic situation, pushes people to consider cheaper modes, I don’t think we can assume that they’ll just come flocking back to the “BMW” — Bus, MRT, Walk.
That said, we need to put this in context —from my records, public transport ridership had already begun to drop by the second half of 2019, fueled by what I suspect is not only the cheap rides, but potentially also by the moral panic of reliability. Grab increasing their fares might make them less of a concern, but the other may not be solved that quickly.
Of course, we also need to consider the greater equation of how much we can afford to give up in the quest for riders before we find ourselves in a bad situation. Remember, every dollar going to transport is a dollar that’s not going to education or healthcare. From my point of view, though, I think this may not actually be such a worst-case scenario, especially if there are already organizational changes in place to reduce the fiscal demands of running the public transport system in the first place.
Monthly passes aren’t worth it
The new world of work where one only goes to the office three days or so a week is ill-suited to the current system of monthly passes. First off, how much is a monthly pass? For adults, it’s $128, whether you’re a pleb or have the Workfare concession card. So how do you spend $128 only on public transport in a month? You don’t. Even on a five day work week, it would be around $3.20 a trip, which is simply not possible. Maybe if you went to a lot of places on the weekends, you might barely break even. With the supposed death of the five-day work week, even that assumption no longer holds true.
I think there’s no running away from the fact that people can be priced out of housing nearer to their workplaces, which is why transport fare increases are also not taken well. That’s also why you have HDB getting in a knot about how to preserve somewhat-fair access to developments in high-demand areas. Sure, one may be able to get a cheaper home in further-out estates like CCK or Tengah, but that still means higher daily expenses on transportation. Even so, it still may be unlikely that a significant enough group of people need to spend $128 a month on public transport.
It’s thus fair to say that most people either rely directly on stored-value travel, or use their bank cards (I’m in the latter group). And that was already with the status quo — if you can now work three days in the office, one day at home, and have a four day work week, all the more does the $128 pass look less and less reasonable. But from what I see, it plays one key role — providing a ceiling for transit fares so as to cushion the impact of a fare increase. If they don’t change the price of the pass, a fare increase can result in more people paying the maximum $128, and if you were already paying $128, you don’t pay any more.
We can probably do this in a better way, though, with a system of daily and/or weekly caps much like in London, as well as a monthly cap at $128 doing the same job as the old passes. Travel a lot in a single day, or just a few days during the week? You get capped across the day or week and so you pay the cap amount. Any more travel after that for the rest of the day or week is free, and since it’s free, transfer rules no longer apply.
This may have benefits in places such as the CBD and perhaps the JRL, where a dense rail network means that shorter trips and errands can be pushed to rail, as compared to bus-hopping to take advantage of the loophole provided by a 45-minute transfer window between buses. On the other hand, though, with a relative improvement in frequency across the board, maybe the 45-minute transfer window can be relooked and perhaps shortened too. Also, with the higher cost of additional-fare services (not under current pass regimes anyway) being cushioned by the cap, it may make the services somewhat more attractive too.
Applying this in practice should not be that difficult since the SimplyGo system already has to settle fares offline when paying by bank card or contactless, and with a small technology upgrade, should be able to refund the fare paid for CEPAS card users (much like how bus exit readers actually give you a refund). For students and other groups with concession fares, cap values can also be lowered correspondingly for them to get the same benefits.
Keep it flat?
This is another thing that can be considered, but I’ve long been mixed about how well flat fares for buses can work — on the MRT system, it’s obviously out of the question, with the longer distances travelled by MRT.
Yet, on the surface, with several very long trunk routes, it is a similar story with buses. It would be fair to say that such routes cannot be operated reasonably from an economic perspective if flat fares for buses were to be implemented as a blanket policy. After all, flat fares spit in the face of the entire fundamental of the distance fare system — that you are charged based on how far you go.
Feeder buses within the new towns already do operate somewhat of a flat fare, since you’re charged a fare for up to 3.2km of travel (and transfers work based on this system), but the definition of a feeder service is rather arbitrary. Routes like 860 and 983 would fit the definition of a feeder, but are not called feeders just because they make a short detour out of the HDB new town to serve a train station just a little bit further away. This may discourage people from using an alternative MRT line and feeder bus to continue their journey for whatever reason, especially as we start to consider how modes can play well with each other.
Perhaps it ought to be changed. Long trunk routes should mostly be cut, yes. Those that remain should be the exception, not the norm, and it’s possible that a distance fare system could still be retained for them. But most short distance bus trips should not be affected; and in fact, charging like feeders as a general rule might make bus travel a more popular option for neighbourhoods, considering the rise of flexible-working reducing long commutes but increasing local travel.
But what about those who need to transfer across multiple buses? I’m thinking that additional trips can simply be charged by adding one or two more distance blocks to the original fare, as long as the transfer rules are met. Not meeting transfer rules means a new fare is charged, but perhaps that might not be an issue if there are caps.
Accessibility
The point of all this is to increase accessibility, particularly financial accessibility. Why only focus on this when there are many other factors?
Making such accessibility changes can offer some cheap wins; all that may be needed to implement this is probably some bureaucrat in Excel to build the business case, and a public education campaign that probably has to come with the next fare hike anyway.
The rest, though, I do not think there are simple solutions. With minor exceptions scattered around the island, I do not think that service levels are a major issue — but even if it were, with the question of manpower hanging over us, I don’t think that there are easy solutions to that. More vehicles aren’t necessarily a good idea if we can’t find people to staff them; from this point of view, the interest in autonomous shuttles is understandable.
The absolute last mile, with walking from the origin point to bus and train stations, also needs to be looked at; but this is either best left for another day or for other writers more interested in the street design aspects of urbanism than I am.
In the meantime, retooling the fare system in the hopes of attracting more riders, even for short neighbourhood hops, sounds like a good idea to me.
