Herald of the change
Recent announcements regarding public buses may tell us what to expect in the future.
First, the Bus Safety Tripartite Taskforce has reported its findings and produced its recommendations.
Second, the LTA has begun procurement for 660 new electric buses.
These two announcements herald change.
There are many hard, inconvenient truths we must all admit within our bus industry. While technology can help, the task force admits that technology is not enough, and the human factor will play a key role in better bus rides. The infrastructure investment needed for bus electrification will also bring limitations that make our current operating model for buses harder to preserve.
The task force’s report can be read here.
Gizmos and gizmos
A key recommendation was the addition of technologies designed to increase awareness of the road environment around the bus, to ensure that bus captains know what’s going on in their surroundings. If anything, some of these specifications have already been included in the requirements for the LTA’s latest electric bus purchase.
Luddites may say that adding more technologies each on an independent screen may cause further distraction. That may apply with the current generation of collision warning systems that each add individual gizmos to the bus dashboard. But intelligently designed, that should not be the case.
The AI-augmented 360-degree cameras proposed by the taskforce can be integrated with the camera mirror systems installed on newer buses, like the electric buses. That way, when the bus captain looks at the display screen for the camera mirror, any potential obstacles can be immediately highlighted there.
And perhaps a design requirement for these technologies should be that they should not require active acknowledgement by the bus captain. For one, anti-fatigue systems already in use apparently deliver tactile feedback to the bus captain’s seat.
The LTA may already be taking other steps towards that vision. Upgrades to bus fleet management systems will see the schedule keeping and communication system merged with the bus fare collection system. But perhaps the specifications for that system can go further, and also fold in assistive technology functionality, like what the LTA has briefly tested.
Fortunately, both the LTA and transport operators have the technical expertise to implement these. Unlike Hong Kong, when a committee of inquiry found that their Transport Department has a lack of technical capability in understanding new bus technologies and encouraging operators to bring them in.
At what cost?
The key thrust of the taskforce’s findings is that drivers must be given adequate rest and a manageable workload. That means we will be able to get less out of our bus network.
Extending drivers’ meal breaks means each driver is less productive, and more shifts must be created to provide the same level of service. To allow all drivers to enjoy a 30 minute lunch break in practice, scheduled lunch breaks may need to be longer than 30 minutes — in Hong Kong it’s 45. Hong Kong bus drivers must have 10 hours of rest between shifts. In Singapore, SBS Transit gives only 9 hours, is that enough?
Relieving congestion at bus interchanges may require drastic network changes, by building significantly more interchanges and terminals, and amendment of bus routes to these new facilities, to free up breathing room inside existing interchanges and terminals. Full scale terminals may not be needed, like what’s done for Service 230 at Caldecott MRT, provided facilities for rest and convenient food access are still implemented.
Increasing run times also means slower buses, but of course bus captains do not need to worry so much to keeping to the schedule. The task force advocates increasing priority measures to give bus captains more peace of mind when driving, and as a side effect, priority measures like bus lanes and bus priority-exit boxes can also increase speeds. It can help the 2 in 10 households that do not have easy rail access. But that may not be enough.
And finally, capping bus run times at two hours means that crazily long routes like services 51 or 61, planned in the 1970s when there was much less traffic on the roads and a need for this connectivity without a rail system, are clearly no longer acceptable to the task force from a safety and driver fatigue perspective. According to Land Transport Guru, it’s possible for some scheduled trips of service 51 to reach three and a half hours — way beyond the pale for this new guideline.
Breaking routes is a double edged sword. Overall, more buses are needed to maintain service levels now that there are 4 or more breaks being taken instead of just two. However, if service levels are changed, this effect could be minimized.
Today’s hyperconnected bus network is built on the backs of bus captains’ labour, and that has its repercussions. In 2024 alone, there were two cases of bus captains passing on after crashing their vehicles. If driver health is a cause of these incidents, then implementing the task force’s recommendations on runtime and rest is non-negotiable.
In the meantime, Tower Transit, operator of Service 858, has implemented a break for service 858 drivers at Changi Airport, cutting a three-hour stint of driving in half. This effectively reopens the Changi T2 bus terminal, closed in the early days of bus contracting to optimize the scope of operations.
But at what cost? TTS must now roster one more driver to operate the same amount of service, which means one less bus is running on the road in order to facilitate such breaks.
Build build build
The second development is in electric vehicle technology. At SITCE 2024, BYD, Zhongtong, and CRRC-ST Engineering demonstrated electric, 12m long, double decker buses with three doors, to meet the LTA’s requirements. The need to wait for technological development that I mentioned, may not be so great after all. Things like range may not be so much of a factor these days, with manufacturers quoting ranges in the hundreds of kilometers, and the LTA claiming that 280km is enough for one bus in a day.
What we now must wait for is infrastructure development, which may disappoint those that may think that the LTA isn’t electrifying fast enough. By end 2027, around 1134 single deck and ~100 double deck buses will retire. These are being replaced by this order, and the 420 single deck electric buses now entering service. Of course, ~1200 diesel buses being replaced by 1080 electric buses is a net decrease in capacity. There’s no sugarcoating this, especially considering that electric vehicles are still more expensive than diesel vehicles.
Or they could miss this goal because they’ve been extending lifespans of old diesel buses.
The cost of electrification is not of the vehicles alone. Infrastructure also has its price. Where will they be stored, and where will they be charged? The LTA is making big investments here, but can they afford to make the investment to support 5800 buses?
The new Sengkang West bus depot began operations at the start of this year, and Gali Batu bus depot is also scheduled to be completed this year too. In 2026, we will get East Coast and Kim Chuan bus depots. Tengah bus depot, being part of the JRL Tengah Depot, will likely open in 2027 along with its JRL facilities. So by the end of 2027, we will have five electric bus-ready depots, each able to store ~500 buses each.
There are more inbound. Pasir Panjang, Lorong Halus, and Simpang bus depots will be completed by 2029. In order to support electric bus operations, all these depots will need high-voltage power supplies to enable electric bus charging. With more electric vehicles, more power is needed; our national grid must also build electrical connections to these new bus depots, and power generation capacity to actually power them.
For example, if all 240 chargers at the new Sengkang West depot are used at the same time to support a large electric fleet, at 360 kilowatt-hours per charger that could mean the depot draws 86 megawatt-hours just for EV charging.
Each EV-ready bus depot may also store less buses than if they were diesel bus-only. East Coast Depot, the most egregious case, has had its capacity cut by a third, supposedly to make space for electric bus infrastructure. With only 8 more depots planned, some of these likely to replace existing infrastructure much like how the Sengkang West bus depot replaces SMRT and SBST Ang Mo Kio Depots, there may not be space to garage 5800 buses.
All this costs money.
When the music stops
Improving bus captains’ welfare and supporting a large-scale electric bus rollout cannot happen without recognizing that the extensive bus network we have has its costs, and now we must pay those costs.
The Bus Service Enhancement Programme reinforced these problems. A political knee jerk reaction to declining satisfaction with buses, overcrowding and declining reliability on trains, and the LTA’s inability to build new lines quickly, the BSEP’s answer was to simply throw more buses at the problem. In terms of political satisfaction, it worked.
But in long term sustainability, it did not. Bus contracting may have inherited all the network faults of the BSEP. The task force themselves highlight how our long bus routes are a legacy of pre-MRT days where buses were necessary to connect distant estates. And if I were a betting man, I’d say the policy intention is to do something about that.
Designing bus network reform can already be done by the LTA’s planning department. The only problem is whether they can gather public support for the changes that need to be made.
It will be difficult for me, or maybe any other layman, to recommend, in detail, changes that can be made to a single bus route. Our bus network is so complex and interconnected that changing one single bus route could result in many cascading changes to other bus routes to preserve coverage. We saw this in the case of Service 167, where Services 75 and 121 had to be amended to make up for the loss in connectivity.
But what we can recommend are broad strokes; broad strokes already set by the task force, electrification, and ongoing manpower shortages.
In general, we could see less buses. Our bus network may look very much like Hong Kong’s — a wide variety of routes, running at low frequencies, some only in peak hours and which compete with the MRT network, offering comfort at the cost of spending an hour on the bus one way. This, however, may trigger a frequency-ridership spiral, where people would rather switch between more frequent rapid transit than wait 20–30 minutes for a direct bus.
Under the Bus Connectivity Enhancement Programme, more alternative routes at lesser frequencies spread out the loads on a singular bus service, which means more and smaller buses instead of gathering everyone on big buses along one or two trunk services. For now, though, it appears that this has a limited impact, with many new BCEP services only connecting to the nearest MRT station. Even Service 21X will only serve a small portion of the full Service 21 route.
The cost of that is a bus network that either has less connectivity, or less convenience, or even both. But who’s willing to pay it? Changes to long bus routes to meet the two-hour runtime limit not only has practical implications with the loss of the perception of connectivity. It also means the end of using the bus as a third place and bus rides as a form of relaxation. Those notions are romantic and people may rue its loss out of a sense of nostalgia, which together may drive most of the public opposition.
These can be somewhat softened if those who want the connectivity of buses are willing to operate the currently, highly demanding shifts, and be part of delivering that connectivity. After all, it is the industry’s hour of need, and every one more bus captain on the roster means an additional bus that can be run, or more rest for current drivers.
Shortening routes and lower frequencies will cause bus ridership to drop. I won’t be surprised if we no longer buy any high-capacity buses, putting an end to the debate on what kind of high-capacity bus is best for us. Because if the 300 double decker buses now under procurement is not only to replace buses retiring by 2027, but also to replace later batches of Volvo double deckers scheduled for retirement in 2028–29, then bus capacity will only drop even further.
The case for rail
All this may sound like a war on bus riders.
And in fact, it must be. We can’t talk about better buses without discussing the investment we must make in rail service. We built the MRT system was because our bus network was unable to cope with our growing city. Younger ones these days may think our parents’ stories of hanging out of the bus steps, clinging on to a pole, may be funny, but they were reality. It’s not surprising that the MRT was welcomed in the late 20th century. Declining safety standards on buses may scare people away from public transport at large, being more harmful than unpopular reform measures.
Off-peak train service network-wide must be increased to make up for those who previously would take long bus rides, but now have to use the MRT to go any further than the next town. Revert the 2019 reduction of off-peak train service by Minister Khaw Boon Wan— a move which may have significantly reduced the off-peak utility of our rail network.
By end 2027, we will not have a significantly large expansion in rail, but utility will sharply increase with CCL6 and Sungei Bedok stations closing two circles, significantly increasing the utility of underused sections of the medium-capacity lines, where there is excess capacity. Incentives can then be given to use the medium-capacity lines instead of buses. After all, even a 3-car MRT train can carry six double decker buses’ worth of passengers.
Also by end 2027, the RTS Link can also reduce bus rides in the Woodlands area, as people who now take a bus from Kranji or Woodlands to the Causeway can take the TEL to Woodlands North station and board the RTS Link there. JRL Stage 1 may also see some switch to rail, as Jurong West residents previously reliant on feeder services use the JRL instead.
And in the longer term, finishing the rest of the JRL and CRL, and projects like the Seletar and Tengah Lines, will also mainly drive mode shift away from buses. We could go even further and start building LRTs again.
While we may start at a position of strength compared to Hong Kong, as always, we can do better. And it starts by recognizing the future that is coming. Can the LTA and Transport Ministry do it, though?
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