Increasing catchment
The East Coast Plan is for you to stop taking the bus to town and start taking the train.
After all, the plan was always, since the 1980s, to allow people to walk to train stations. But how realistic is it in these parts? An attempt has been made, I anticipate it to be mildly successful, but the limitations are very real. That’s because low-density urban sprawl exists in Singapore. For one, let’s look at Joo Chiat and Telok Kurau.
Low headroom
In defense of the area, though, it’s not as low-density compared to some of the American Dream (TM) suburbs. Houses are spaced closer together than Americans would like, and there’s also the occasional low-rise, sub-50 unit condominium thrown in. But in terms of providing public transportation, it still presents challenges that aren’t present in the new towns. Different practices, different tools, and all the necessary tradeoffs, will be needed.
Still, it is necessary to start here with an examination of land development policy. The government has been more than happy to raze forests and reclaim land in order to provide development space. This is done instead of upzoning land through increases in plot ratio, allowing single family homes and other such low-density developments to be densified.
One might argue that high land prices may make it difficult for such single family homes to be acquired in bulk and redeveloped as a block — no developer, let alone the HDB, will pay such a sum for an en bloc sale so long as the Government Land Sales exists. And a fair bit of the GLS supply does indeed come from razing forests and redeveloping land. Fortunately or not, greater public awareness about such activity and its impact on climate change, has meant that there is now public pushback against razing more forest than we have to.
Eventually, this must mean that the powers that be must start thinking about how to densify. The answer now may be to build very high rises in Ang Mo Kio and Queenstown on government land, but there’s only so much you can do there too — and also makes it all the more important to consider capacity expansion projects on existing routes. Furthermore, Paya Lebar Air Base can’t be used as an excuse, since the area closer to the airbase is in fact more built-up.
That is, unless they’re waiting for the departure of the Air Force in order to do everything at one shot in this area with the increased headroom, perhaps alongside the Bayshore developments.
Right thing in the wrong place?
But let’s get back to the topic at hand, which is the area between Bedok, Marine Parade, Sims Avenue, and Tanjong Katong. Absent government plans to densify and upzone, this is one of the few areas a grid bus network makes sense — if only the grid wasn’t at such a macro level that the concept of walking to bus stops largely goes out the window. Within this area, buses pass mostly on the major roads on the way out of the area to someplace else. The solution may thus be more 42s, 92s or 825s that worm through the housing estates and bring people to the train stations.
Why? A lot of the bus services along Still Road or East Coast Road mainly exist to bring passengers direct to the central area — but from which you likely have to walk a significant distance, or give up on public transport and just drive. This is a job that ought to be done by train, but TEL is slightly off in that it serves Marine Parade Road instead. There’s nothing wrong with that, since Marine Parade Road has greater density that has a better chance of supporting the train line by itself, unlike East Coast Road. Low density thus means buses would already be touching the limit of what makes sense to provide. But that’s not all.
What TEL has not brought with it, though, is clear multimodal transfers to the bus services that will be needed to serve this low-density area, especially considering the distance from this area to the Marine Parade corridor. Along the entire TEL4/5 there is only Upper East Coast bus terminal, all the way out there near Sungei Bedok — services wanting to go to the Marine Parade area, such as 966, have to loop at the roundabout without a clear layover point. And looping is bad, since it arbitrarily pushes up one-way trip time. This can be bad for driver welfare depending on the route length.
Perhaps there should have been additional bus terminating facilities built along TEL Stage 4, from which shorter-distance buses routed into the landed housing estates can also be based out of. Eunos interchange can only do so much, and it may not be a good idea to also base these services out of the EWL anyway — since the EWL capacity should be better used for areas around the stations, or Tampines/Pasir Ris/Bedok New Towns which can drive enough demand by themselves. Because of this, turning the Kembangan Station bus stop into a proper terminal may be of limited use as well.
Furthermore, we’ll also need to think about fleet. Sure, we have relatively large 12m buses, but large buses may find themselves more vulnerable to incidents such as sidescrapes or getting trapped on humps; all definitely excuses not to send them on such suburban routes. Even if we have replacements to cover accident damage and repair, using large buses to carry lesser passenger traffic may not work out well. After all, SBS was first to bring in 9.4m long Dennis Darts in the 1990s, specifically for low-traffic landed housing routes with limited road space. Still, much as it isn’t great, we may have to live with the inefficiency for a while, but some service is better than no service.
Then why do this?
With all the infrastructural deficiencies preventing us from pivoting to such a model, it’s easy for us to ask, why bother in the first place. Especially since if you live in a place like this, you may probably already own a car and may not need public transport. This is the 20%, after all, who won’t be living within 15 minutes of a train station. Then again, consider that the point of a car-lite society is to offer as many people as possible the option to use public transportation. 8 in 10 may be able to walk to train stations at some point in the future, so as we move towards that perhaps it may be a better option to place more focus on providing quality bus service to the 2 in 10 who cannot.
The Census does us no favours when examining this area, though, since it splits this area between Bedok, Geylang, and Marine Parade planning areas. Although, while Bedok does have the single largest population out of all planning areas, only about 70% of its residents live in HDB flats — below the national average of approximately 80%. This means that the lower-density housing area, from the border of the planning area at Still Road, is dragging down this average.
Marine Parade planning area, also, has a lower percentage of public transport use, being one of the most car-heavy districts — and even for those who take public transport, it ranks as one of the most bus-reliant planning areas according to the Census. Without thinking about connectivity to the new TEL stations, the TEL may not be able to move the needle much, with such bus routes remaining king to residents.
Given the lengths at which private estates have gone to defend their public transport facilities, it’s likely fair to say that these lower-density areas also deserve good public transportation. Whatever bus improvements made here, such as an improved network with higher coverage, can hopefully shift some of the car rides to public transport to help both decarbonization aims and congestion relief aims.
We can also consider an ageing society where elderly drivers pose a risk to the safety of the roads and providing quality public transportation within a short walk matters to the quality of life of these people. This area may not be greying that fast in terms of proportion compared to the overall planning area, but we’re looking at absolutes, not proportions.
Play to each other’s strengths
But to do this, something else may have to give. It’s easy to say that if and when upzoning happens, perhaps we can then increase bus service — but the way things are going at that time, self-driving buses will likely already be mainstream. A massive increase on bus service at that time would be quite easy, with no need to scramble to find drivers and other such issues. But can we afford to wait?
There’s no competing public transport mode here, so it may be quite safe to say, just run it and they will come, as long as the resources are available. Any potential success we find could potentially be replicated in similar places such as Kovan, Serangoon Gardens, and Bukit Timah. Though similar efforts could already be made for Bukit Timah now considering the presence of the DTL.
Integrated transport planning does mean, after all, that different modes of transport get to each do what they do best. If trains carry a lot of people, the bus network doesn’t have to. It can then be used better, to provide service to places where trains don’t make sense, or are unfortunately too out of the way.
Maybe that might mean areas like Whampoa and Bukit Merah can also get more attention.
