After long enough, confirmation has come from up north that they do indeed want to carry on with the Johor Bahru-Singapore Rapid Transit System.
But is this going to be the end of uncertainty regarding the RTS? Nope.
Remember that we were supposed to be here in 2013 or so, since the RTS was initially planned in the 2010 agreement, as a replacement to the KTM service in Singapore which was supposed to be closed down. The RTS, alongside with Thomson Line Stage 1 (now TEL1), was to connect the Singapore MRT system with Johor Bahru (and in fact, I daresay, likely contributed to the decision to split off that 3-station “stage” by itself). All this was to be done by 2018. Yes. Last year. And we’re almost in 2020 now.
Short term factors are included too. Allegations of pork barrel politics for the Tanjung Piai by-election aside, it appears that they managed to scrounge up the money, getting a 36% discount in the process. This appears to be the same tactic the good Doctor Mahathir used against China with regard to the East Coast Rail Link, but in the process they managed to increase the scope of that railway while cutting costs.
Over here, it hasn’t appeared to be the case.
Sticker shock
Poor Minister Loke. Even under-construction projects were not saved from the old man’s Thatcherite austerity drive. MRT2, MRT3, LRT3, you name it, the folks in the Klang Valley got their transit projects cut. And they ask for some sympathy, given how the mythical Billion Dollar Whale and his comrades made off with billions of ringgit from government coffers.
I’ll give it to them given the tradeoffs they’ve made already. As mentioned above, ECRL is a unicorn, the cost cutting made by the Malaysian government for other projects is clearly down to a bare minimum. Now the grim reaper of austerity has come for the RTS.
Cuts made by the good doctor and his administration include getting the owner of the Bukit Chagar terminus land (for some reason, it ended up in the hands of the Sultan) to hand it over for free with the promise of property development rights after the RTS in in place. That saved them about 800 million ringgit, or half the 36% discount.
Another cut they want to make is a change of technology. Right now, the RTS is planned to share major electrical and mechanical services, such as trains, signalling, and power, with the soon-to-open TEL. The idea behind that is to allow the RTS to piggyback on the TEL contracts, reducing the cost of acquisition due to economies of scale, as well as the cost of operation since they can simply draw from SMRT TEL’s resources.
Alas, Minister Loke is getting sticker shock at the cost of all this. We’ll see how in a bit.
Would it have been enough?
The idea the minister had is that they want to go to “LRT” technology. Personally, the term “LRT” is a pretty flexible one, so we’ll have to start by defining it.
So, for the sake of argument, what is LRT? Let’s put aside what it means in Singapore (if you want to know, it’s “people mover”). In the Klang Valley sense, we’re generally talking about smaller train cars, but still with similar systems as rapid transit lines. Steel on steel, underground sections, you name it.
The Ampang and Sri Petaling LRT lines run 6-car trains. On paper that sounds impressive, but each car is only about 14m long and 2.65m wide. That’s around half the size of a Singapore MRT train car which is 3.2m wide and 22.8m long. Consequently, 6 Ampang/Sri Petaling Line train cars would be equal to 3 Singapore MRT cars.
Over on the Kelana Jaya LRT line, full-size trains are 4 cars, 68m long, and are rated to carry 220 passengers in each car for a total of 880 passengers —also not too far from our Circle and Downtown lines, which carry 930 in 3-car trains. Hence, if I wanted to I could go and tell Minister Loke with a straight face that our CCL and DTL are already LRT. The trains for the upcoming JRL are also pretty similar to KL LRT trains anyway.
The question lies in what you do with the technology. So what’s the problem?
Math. Remember how I said Minister Loke might have a case of sticker shock? The RTS is proposed to carry ten thousand “passengers per hour per direction” (in short, pphd). Let’s take this to mean “theoretically how many people, standing on this platform, can be transported by trains within an hour”.
Let’s use Kelana Jaya Line trains. Ten thousand divided by 880 gets you 12. So that means you’d need to send 12 trains in the space of an hour to get ten thousand people off one RTS platform — which works out to a train every five minutes.
Now, if you use TEL trains, ten thousand divided by 1250 (a rough estimated capacity based on comparable MRT trains), you get eight. At eight trains per hour, that’s a train every 7.5 minutes. At that sort of frequency, Minister Loke probably thinks, why should he even spend the money building a double track RTS? Single track with passing loops like the Changi Skytrain inside Jewel, or perhaps smaller vehicles to decrease the size of the required track structures?
More than ten thousand reasons why
One only needs to look at the Causeway to see why, if those ideas get implemented, it will be quite a shitshow. How? Today, over 300,000 people cross the Causeway every day. Let’s make the following assumptions about them.
- 60% of them will take the RTS, giving us a daily ridership of 180k trips.
- 80% of those trips are cross-border commuters who cross the Causeway to work in Singapore every day, and return to JB at night. We’ll have to count them twice, so these folks will account for (180k x 80%) /2 = 72,000 travellers.
- 60% of those 72,000 travellers will head south into Singapore during the peak from 8–10am every day, and go back up north from 6–8pm (go fiddle with this CNA infographic), which means we’ll have 43,200 passengers who travel during the two hours of peak.
We’ll take this number and run with it. If we’re going to have to transport 43,200 passengers in one direction in 2 hours, we’ll have to transport 21,600 passengers per hour in that direction today— far above the 10,000 proposed by the RTS. With Kelana Jaya Line trains you’d need 21600/880 = about 25 trains per hour, with TEL trains only about 21600/1250 = about 18.
So there will definitely have to be space to meet expansion between now and 2027 or whatever when this RTS finally opens. And in fact, once RTS trains have to run at 30 trains per hour (matching the TEL) in order to cater to the demand likely to be induced by such a link, you’re talking about 37,500 pphd with TEL trains, but only 26,400pphd with Kelana Jaya line trains.
The RTS is pretty clearly under-specced even now, and I’d make a pretty bold guess as to why that’s the case. “But muh bikes,” Dr M says, “No one can bring a motorbike on the MRT train!” While it is pretty silly, he’s right. No one will bring a motorbike on the MRT train. They’d probably continue riding their motorbikes across the Causeway and worsening the congestion there. And the Malaysian government would have spent a whole bunch of money on an expensive white elephant. Consequently, planners were forced to moderate their projections, and that’s how we got to 10,000 pphd.
So if we want them to take the RTS, how do they get to the RTS terminal, then, which is the crux of the old man’s concerns? The good thing about kicking this thing down the road for so long, is that by 2027 or whatever when this thing finally opens, Johor Bahru will at least have decent public transportation, be it through the Iskandar Malaysia BRT, or the proposed KTM Komuter service that is waiting for electrification of the Gemas-JB section of KTM railway. That should get you to Bukit Chagar. And at Woodlands North, obviously the TEL is there.
And then if the old man wants to get back at us, he can always raise the Causeway toll.
Better a time than never
The business case isn’t 100% there, but it still sounds like a better deal than what we had at first. But can it be improved further? I think it can.
The first and simplest thing to do would be to reassess the amount of people likely to use the RTS, especially with all the new JB public transportation projects. 20,000 pphd may be a good estimate if you ask me, and with that it should be easier to justify the expense of TEL systems.
Then, if the Malaysians don’t want to pay for the heavier systems of the TEL, we can pay for them, and collect the money back through additional surcharges on the RTS Link.
They can also choose to reduce the amount of works they have to do. A light maintenance facility is planned to be built in Malaysia. Maybe they don’t need that too, which could save them a few hundred million ringgit. After all, if compatibility with the TEL is to be retained, all maintenance work can simply be done in Mandai, with the RTS Link fleet rotated in and out of Mandai Depot as necessary. You also likely won’t need a train storage area, since trains can be stored in station platforms.
However, all those benefits and opportunities to cut upfront costs will be lost if they choose to develop a bespoke LRT system for this shuttle instead, which will still need its own depots and workshops. Even the Waterloo and City line of the Tube, a similar shuttle, has similar trains to the Central line because it was cheaper to replace trains for both at the same time. Worse still, developing a bespoke LRT is likely to increase operations costs, which means that ticket prices will have to go up — higher than the RM15 Loke was already complaining about.
Another measure to improve the business case would be to get rid of the Woodlands North terminal altogether and just run TEL trains through to the RTS. An integrated terminal shared by both nations can then be built at Bukit Chagar, with construction costs split between both nations. RTS passengers would then not be inconvenienced with another transfer at Woodlands North, which may further increase ridership still. Malaysia gets to save money since they’re going Dutch on the Bukit Chagar terminus, and pretty much everyone’s better off.
The only thing I think would be hard to stomach is the fact that Singapore law is (technically) enforced on Malaysian soil, which wouldn’t sit well with the Malay nationalists. But isn’t that already the case for the current RTS arrangement, where southbound passengers clear Singapore immigration at Bt Chagar before stepping onto a train?
The time has come. Shit or get off the pot.

