Manpower issues
We can’t find enough bus drivers. What if we can’t find enough MRT staff too?
A lot of this will be conjecture and hearsay, but it has to be looked at anyway. I get that it sounds insensitive in the current situation where more people may find themselves unemployed in no fault of their own. The bigger question to ask, though, is whether the employment pool from which such workers can be drawn will still exist, with the drive for upskilling and such.
Furthermore, an expanding rail network will still require people to staff it, so whatever productivity improvement that is implemented may not necessarily result in job losses since reassignment has to occur in order to staff the new stations.
It is very important to also remember that Singapore is a city-state, has its own immigration policy, and how the reliance on cheap foreign labour, not only in construction, is not necessarily a good thing. That might also go for the seniors who form a majority of the station usher staff.
When all you have is a hammer
I’ve spilled enough ink on why on the automated lines, placing someone on every train to watch dramas on their phones is a bad thing; with current public health measures, train operators have even taped off the entire front of the train to provide space for their personnel, impacting capacity more than providing a cab will.
The moral here is trust. There was a reason why Alstom managed to sell the LTA a driverless system at the turn of the century when building the NEL — they clearly saw the benefits. Automated lines are being built all across the world, even in locations where labour is freely available. Most notably, the Daxing Airport Express in Beijing is over 40km with only a single intermediate station and with speeds comparable to suburban regional rail. They’ve seen fit to automate that despite the challenges of having no one onboard, as far as I can tell, for such a long journey.
Fortunately, one of the things SMRT is doing properly is to cross-train such staff for station duties, for when the day comes when they decide the system is trustworthy enough that it can once again function as expected. It also needs mentioning that the Circle Line was the last line to fully man its trains — up until last year or so, staff were only onboard for the exceptionally long section between Botanic Gardens and Caldecott.
Decoupling staff availability from train service allows the other benefit of automated systems to come into play — quick ramp-up of service as necessary to accommodate both foreseen and unforeseen events, allowing us to make the most out of system investment such as ordering so many trains. Some amount of manpower will have to be retained; but they can be based in stations to assist station staff, or a patrol route established.
But first, they must conquer the many what-ifs that arise when people are taken off the trains, to bring down the risk to a level as low as reasonably practicable; the current situation being in the unsustainable category if you ask me. Then again, perhaps all this risk assessment should have taken place at system design time, or they wouldn’t have signed the contract with Alstom to automate the NEL in the late 1990s.
Everything looks like a nail
This kind of thinking may also have caused the powers that be to think that dropping the cash on 450 buses that haven’t yet seen a lot of use is a good idea. As mentioned before by me and many others, that is also clearly quite defective, and that’s before considering the mad science experiments of 2017–18 that brought in even more.
On the other hand, the Bus Contracting Model was one of the few good spots — bringing in other operators allowed for fresh perspectives and operating models to be introduced, in order to keep the incumbents on their toes. But this might have made the above issues worse. Word on the street is that with expanded interlining to reduce vehicles needed being a possible explanation (such as double deckers on 333 and 941, hitherto unseen), Tower Transit has seen fit to exile at least 50 buses back to the LTA storage with their new contract term.
That might be a win-win to everyone except LTA Bus Leasing, if not for the fact that because of those 50 buses being returned to storage, TTS also cut frequencies across the entire Bulim package. Why? Well, simply put, they’re expanding and the drivers are needed elsewhere. But yuuka, you say, “the union rules say no worker should be retrenched; they should be offered a job by the new operator who is to respect seniority, or can also choose to remain with their existing employer. What’s going on?”
I think the explanation is simple. All the more for the typical driver demographic, changing employers once you’ve gotten comfortable with processes and practices has a level of culture shock, which could be a factor in Mandai drivers choosing not to go over to TTS with the package. After all, a similar story played out when Go-Ahead entered the market.
But this time TTS is an established player and their operating model well-known in the industry. As such, it is believeable that SMRT’s staff may not have wanted to move to TTS to whatever reason. Then, in order to beef up the incoming Mandai operation, it is possible that drivers have been reassigned from Bulim. Unfortunately, there’s no other solution, apart from even more aggressive advertising to recruit more drivers from whatever sources. Route and frequency cuts, while unfortunate, should also not be taken out of the question; be they only a short-term thing while drivers are recruited, or in the long term to reduce the overall usage of resources in more ways than one.
With the crunch being industry-wide, SMRT should also be more than willing and able to find openings for a large portion of drivers opting to stay with them, leaving TTS high and dry to train its own pool of drivers from scratch. And unfortunately for TTS, bringing in foreign drivers from certain other countries may not be possible; even if it were, it might be difficult due to rising standards in their home countries, not only in terms of salaries but also in public transport demand.
Let’s be a little smarter
Maybe the station staffing paradigm could also be relooked. There are two reasons why I say this — firstly, the need to manage building services and provide a visible staff presence, and secondly, that almost every line is forced to have a separate operation due to the separation of interchange stations.
The second issue happens even at Bayfront, where despite being a shared cross-platform interchange, SBST has their operation at one end of the station and SMRT the other, and may repeat itself at Sungei Bedok and Jurong East post-JRL where multiple lines will also share a common station building. Likewise at Dhoby Ghaut and Promenade, where redundant passenger service centres are provided in the paid area for CCL and DTL respectively just because someone needs to be there to monitor systems.
It’s understandable, since at system design time the operator is unknown and it’s a good idea to just keep them separate just in case. For starters, maybe this could change — with one operator being in charge of the entire station including its building services, and the other only supplying someone to monitor rail systems and be on standby for manual operations of trains if needed. All parties could then sit in a single stationmaster’s room to monitor the operations of the entire interchange complex.
What about handling passengers, though? A while back they were playing with Assisted Service Kiosks for potential implementation on TEL, and now you can find one specimen at the TEL Woodlands station. This makes sense — customer service work can be outsourced to a call center somewhere that can be kept more busy, instead of each station devoting a member of staff to almost full-time assisting passengers. Additionally or otherwise, intercoms can also be placed more liberally around stations and connected to the stationmaster’s room, where the main operator of the station can more readily assist passengers. This is also something that might be needed for unmanned faregate areas far from any manned presence.
An argument can also be made that building services should be controlled from the OCC. This may already happen at the LRT stations, which should have been designed to be completely unstaffed, but I’m not entirely sure. On the heavy rail side of things, you have MTR and Admiralty Group Station Control from which most of the South Island Line is run, taking that previous suggestion to its extreme; apart from a token (outsourced!) service staff presence at the stations, everyone else sits at Admiralty. The new Shatin to Central Link also doesn’t have staffed customer service points either, leaving gatelines completely unmanned or with someone walking about.
Or do nothing?
On the flip side, here’s an argument for not touching permanent station staffing levels: Take away people on the train, and you’ll need station staff with sufficient technical knowledge to be able to handle train faults; or when an issue arises in the station services, someone who knows how to stop the bleeding at least before maintenance personnel show up. Basically, the same people get more to do, but that’s basically what they signed up for in 2003. You’ve got to pick one approach, and perhaps leverage technology to also reduce the duties of staff.
But if this is done, since SMRT cross-trains its automatic line train staff, it can then be possible to use these staff to also help meet requirements for upcoming MRT stations; but this may only kick the can down the road by a few years. There may be concerns about completely unstaffing the underground CRL stations, but with the large proportion of interchanges, some of them can be mitigated by sharing the station management with the other line.
That leaves JRL, with relatively more stations. Will this work? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps there could just be one key person in charge of a handful of JRL stations, with the OCC can then be equipped to mainly handle the management of stations, much like on LRT lines. A small staff presence is then retained at the station chiefly for on-call purposes to handle unexpected events, if that’s not directly combined into train rover patrol routes. Plus, the security presence is unlikely to go away. Station security staff could also be trained in order to handle other incidents that may arise.
Another low hanging fruit could be to replace jobs commonly done by the elders, such as station cleaners and service ambassadors with robots as well. This is already happening, at least for the cleaners. In addition to assisted service kiosks, the robots could take on a customer service role as well, with help panels for commuters and perhaps an intercom link to OCC or the station control room for queries the help panels cannot resolve.
