Seven thousand
Much ado about school bus services.
Recent headlines have mostly been about how the cost of school bus services have been shooting up. Now, this is a far bigger problem than just school buses; it’s a question of how well are we using limited driver resources.
There are eighteen thousand registered buses in Singapore; of which only slightly under six thousand are public buses. Another 2500 are private buses used for private purposes. So what are the approximately 1800 school buses and seven thousand registered excursion buses doing?
The Russian pot
Running a school bus requires some pretty stringent conditions. According to OneMotoring, a bus carrying school children must have modifications made to its hazard lights such that the hazard lights will turn on whenever the bus doors are open. A “Children Crossing” sign must also be installed, with LED lights that have similar behavior.
This is likely to be cheap. What is not cheap is that once a bus carries more than 30 students, or is used by childcare centres or kindergartens, it must have a bus attendant onboard, effectively doubling the manpower cost of operating a bus, as the attendant also needs to be paid a salary. But at least one doesn’t have to legally be a “school bus” — in fact, since the LTA is no longer giving out “school bus” licenses, it’s very difficult to register as one. Instead, excursion buses are given a tax rebate if they undertake school bus duties.
Neither is it entirely possible, or desirable, to cut back totally on school bus services. De La Salle School, in Yew Tee, is possibly the only school I know of to have a special driveway and back gate specifically for parents to drop off their children for school in the morning. It’s probably understandable. Get your boy into De La Salle and it’s a through train to the affiliated St. Joseph’s Institution if he doesn’t mess up. You can thus probably expect a lot of expensive cars clogging up Choa Chu Kang Street 52. Continuing to provide school bus options helps to manage some of this load.
This is not a small number. There are at least 180 primary schools — each school hiring 10 buses will already keep all the registered school buses busy enough already. Some schools may have more, which worsens the situation.
An old issue
Tangentially at the same time the topic of transporting foreign workers in lorries is back on the discussion table again after a spate of accidents. Once again, big business is pitted against bleeding hearts whom demoan the profit-seeking mindsets of SME towkays. And considering the events of the past few years with how the foreign workers were treated, it’s not the first time this conflict has taken place.
Now I think the SME towkays are more in the wrong, but that doesn’t mean the bleeding hearts have it either. A sudden ban means jobs will be lost and companies will close down — the former happened with the PMD ban already with delivery jobs disappearing overnight. While an argument can possibly be made that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and some of these companies which are unable to adapt should be left to close down, you also need to consider what is left in their wake. Take, for example, what happened when the HDB had to dismiss a main contractor.
The LTA has, interestingly, some power of its own to set an example. It can simply decree that any contractor, main contractor or subcontractor, working for LTA projects — of which there are many — will not be allowed to use lorries to transport its workers. And mitigations can also be provided by the LTA itself. Remember the over 100 or so storage buses kept by the LTA? It can make arrangements with these construction companies to use these spare buses to transport the workers they use.
But what about the rest of the industry? Sure, perhaps large-scale developments like Changi T5, Tengah and Punggol Point can have on-site co-located workers’ dormitories, making it possible for these workers to simply walk to work or something and avoid a vehicular commute. But that’s not available to everyone.
So with the fact that most of the foreign workers use centralized workers’ dormitories, could some kind of “reverse school bus” be provided? Several companies going the same direction could be matched up and share the costs of a bus. The onus could be placed on main contractors and project owners to do this coordination; perhaps with the help of technology such as the Beeline platform open sourced by GovTech.
The policy solution
Another problem that compounds all these demands for the same amount of buses is that drivers are ageing and retiring, with a statutory retirement age of 75 set for private bus drivers. And not just that — with the electrification of road vehicles, these drivers are increasingly being asked to consider purchasing much more expensive electric vehicles instead, if not then vehicles that meet higher emissions standards.
As things currently stand, a BYD C6 can cost close to double the price of ye olde Toyota Coaster, at $239k for the BYD over $129k for the Toyota. Is it any surprise why these older drivers choose to just retire themselves and their vehicles instead?
Yes, the Education Ministry has temporarily facilitated the hiring of foreign bus drivers. But that’s just kicking the can down the road; what happens when their permits expire? Likewise, the benefits of common pick up and drop off points are limited; the requirement for an attendant will kick in at 30 students anyway. More structural reform might be necessary at that point in time, though this move buys time for the bureaucrats to come up with something. In the meantime, here’s what they can consider.
For one, if the Education Ministry sets a nationwide fare scheme for school buses and pays a mileage rate much like public bus contracting, it may be a better option to help school bus drivers make ends meet. Through this, the Ministry can also help shape some behaviors — if it wants parents to think more about sending their children to a school near their home, it can do so by reflecting the cost of school bus services closer to their true value. Or to help P5 and P6 students adjust to using public transport to secondary school, it can find ways to discourage parents from using the school bus service. While this may drive down demand, it’s not entirely a bad thing.
Perhaps the LTA could even help link school bus services with Premium bus services, especially since after dropping off the kids at school, the buses are already in most residential estates and can easily drive over to the starting point of the Premium bus service. That way, sole-proprietor bus drivers can have a secondary source of income to help defray their costs as well. Alternatively, these bus drivers could also work with construction companies provided the public is accepting of this.
That is, if not for one more factor…
The workers’ bus
Go to any job board, and you’ll see that many companies, especially those in Jurong and Tuas industrial areas, proudly proclaim that part of their benefits is a free employee shuttle bus to Jurong East station; some employers may also offer services to other stations.
But is it wise for these to be competing with the public transport system for passengers, and for drivers/other resources with school bus and foreign worker transport services? Of course, if timing works out, they may not compete, with buses able to switch from transporting students, to transporting workers as in the Premium bus service case above, or neighbourhood pick up points for larger firms.
They could even do the Jurong East services provided, of course, there’s enough time for them to get to the west side. St Stephen’s School (interestingly, also affiliated to SJI) is not in the west, so too bad that they got hit hard by the woes of the bus industry. Even if the schedules for this could be made to work, it’s not hard to imagine the lost time getting from the east to the west.
And that’s not to mention the amount of additional infrastructure that has been built out for these services at Venture Drive at the south exit of Jurong East MRT, or the additional daily gridlock of buses we might not want at what will be a major regional centre if not the 2nd CBD.
San Francisco had that latter problem, with private employee shuttles (called tech buses over there, with their main clientele being tech companies) just stopping at random roadsides and holding up public Muni bus service. What did they do? They taxed these tech buses— not per head as IRAS claims that’s not doable, but per-stop. We can do that too.
The LTA already has a mechanism for regulating bus stop use. Bringing these private pick-up points under the same mechanism, and allowing/denying their use as appropriate with the relevant fees, could help shape some behavior — perhaps including making the Tuas West Extension much more relevant.
This does mean a greater burden falls on the public transport service, though. But that’s not the end of the world. The challenge now falls on the LTA to better allocate its resources and backfill the needs previously met by private shuttles. Likewise, driving up some of the costs to run private services can also mean a cash infusion for public bus services.
Scale and stretch
The suggestion I’d like to make here is that perhaps instead of allowing private shuttles to proliferate, we should be making more investments in semi-public transport instead. But how? There is demand. Plenty, if the Tuas stereotypes are any indication. Long commute times to Jurong and Tuas, considering that much of Singapore’s population lives in the east, would be able to drive the economics of direct express services; if people used them, that is. And the old City Direct network and today’s Premium bus services also use coach and other kind of buses that also do school bus duties, too.
Yes, the CRL will also eventually address this issue, but we’re also talking a minimum of 10 years before the CRL reaches Tuas, and we have to be realistic that we need to do something in the medium term. Some form of “Tuas Direct” service analogous to the City Direct network could be a medium term solution, with given trips a day departing from large housing estates in the east, after completing school bus duties, to Tuas.
In fact, “Tuas Direct” could even be a wholesale replacement for the City Direct network, with the expansion of the rail network meaning that we can take away City Direct in favour of rail services. Similarly, once CRL3 reaches Tuas in the mid-2030s, these services can be withdrawn in favour of the CRL, reducing the costs of such cross island travel and providing the CRL with a ready ridership pool.
But the main issue is this — the economics may be shaky, especially if we want to encourage people to use the network but they are rightfully less enthusiastic about paying express fares and yet getting stuck in jams. By driving it’s already about 40km from Tampines to Tuas; by train over an hour. Though I guess you might find people already doing this, with the rise of illegal carpooling groups as reported in the news a while back.
Perhaps, the solution may then be to encourage not just commuters, but also companies in Tuas, to participate in the Travel Smart Journeys program in the meantime. Instead of paying for private shuttles from Jurong East, Woodlands, or even Tampines, some means should be established for these companies to co-fund public transport services to the Tuas and Jurong regions; subsidizing the high operating costs of such services. Large land developers and regional employers like JTC and PSA can also step in, and this approach can also extend to large business parks not easily reachable by public transport either such as Woodlands Wafer Park.
This is, in fact, an approach being lobbied for in the Bay Area. VTA in Silicon Valley is already doing it; AC Transit further north is being encouraged by activists to consider it, instead of allowing tech buses and other forms of development-run private bus services to proliferate. Here, the benefit could be not only be that we make better use of the limited private bus resources we have, by ensuring that they can better serve a social need such as fetching students and perhaps workers.
Overall, it seems that the moral of the story is that we need to scale and stretch. Not only can worker transport be rationalized by encouraging different companies to share a transport service — be it for foreign workers or for locals — we also need to consider the social costs of transporting our school children and what it means for the rest of us, especially in a high-cost enviroment that is slowly driving more out of the business.
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