Shuffling the deck
How the public transport development in Tengah plays out will be a sign of how adaptable the system is.
There may be concerns about Tengah Plantation BTOs that won’t have MRT service when the BTOs are eventually completed and released to buyers in 2023–24. These concerns may be addressed by the upcoming Tengah Boulevard bus interchange, which probably is meant to serve in the interim before a permanent ITH is constructed in the town. It could be before, or after, the JRL is ready to carry passengers in 2028.
The framing issue here may be how any potential new Tengah services will be able to fit into the current system, and what system-level changes may need to be done in order to accommodate this new Tengah bus system. Apart from that, what happens after the JRL enters service also needs to be considered, especially if we lack the medium-term fleet capacity to massively ramp up the bus service.
You and whose army
To run any transport route you need vehicles. You need drivers too, but that’s been explored before, and it’s always quite possible that increasing wages and continued disruption to the tourism industry may have helped recruitment for the public bus operators.
The issue with the LTA owning bus fleets is that it has to be able to predict how much vehicles each operator might need, compared to other forms of contracting practiced elsewhere where the incoming operator can propose its own fleets. Even if the LTA has the ability to dictate levels of service, hyper-optimizations of deployments performed by Tower Transit and Go-Ahead actually help reduce the absolute number of vehicles that these two operators need, allowing them to reduce their fleet holdings and thus minimize leasing fees paid.
Should Tower Transit and/or Go-Ahead manage to expand their presences in Singapore by securing more packages, it thus goes to reason that they would be able to use similar practices to further reduce overall fleet requirements. As such, excess vehicles will once again be returned to the LTA. In contrast, SBST has nearly 400 buses (at time of writing) designated as “spare”, and SMRT over a hundred, that they do not assign to regular services. In total these make up nearly 10% of the registered public omnibus fleet and do not include special “training” buses.
Sure, we could “make good use of our assets” and hand over basically everything in storage to SBS Transit, thus forcing them to retire all their pre-Euro V vehicles by the end of March 2023. The previous agreement did indeed have provisions for the retirement of several older vehicles, albeit leaving out any talk of compensation — though that’s probably considered sensitive commercial information and exempt from freedom of information provisions in other countries anyway. So it’s definitely not off the table.
But doing this would mean we have no more vehicles to use to start up new transport services with. That is, unless the fleets with the existing operators are worked harder. Will SBST and SMRT agree to reduce their spare factor and assign some spare buses to new Tengah services? Or can Tower Transit and Go-Ahead further work their “flexi-deployment” schemes to eke out those few more vehicles?
Or will we just end up having to cut service somewhere else to meet this demand? Cuts in the coverage domain may result from the opening of new train lines, but will that be enough especially considering SBST’s impending fleet renewals, and in light of a political commitment to only purchase low-emissions and/or electric vehicles going forward? And would it be a better use of those freed-up resources to be given to improving existing service levels where buses are still a key form of transport? Whether I like it or not, they still exist.
The man behind the wheel
An examination of new routes introduced in the BCM era presents an interesting conundrum. Experience has shown that it is not a guarantee that the main operator present in the geographic region will be the operator of a new service — we saw this with 110 (SMRT in Sengkang) and 974 (Tower Transit in Joo Koon).
These may be one off cases. But the way they have been managed, may mean that service introductions on the scale of what are likely to happen in Tengah (perhaps 3–4 new bus services, and reroutes or breaking of existing ones) may provide cause for concern. Remember, having to spin up operations in many places is bad, especially if just for the sake of 1 or 2 services.
But at the same time, bus planners should not work in a vacuum. Should they be able to push through wide-ranging bus service changes in order to accommodate the staged opening of rail projects in the next few years, it means several packages are considerably affected in terms of mileage and fleet size as bus service changes are made to feed journeys to, and reduce duplication with, the new MRT lines.
The startup of bus service in Tengah might thus be an opportunity to restructure several bus packages in the region, and at the same time implement some of the package size reforms earlier discussed on the blog. Perhaps some overlaps and oddities (like Clementi feeders being operated out of the Bulim package instead of the Clementi package) can also be eliminated, in order to reduce the absolute amount of packages and perhaps reduce accordingly the demand for built infrastructure.
Similar consolidation could also happen at Tampines, with the TEL being the third MRT line to the east, Tampines North estate, and the upcoming temporary bus interchange there. This would be a better approach instead of taking the easy way out and only amending several routes from the current Tampines interchanges to run through the town centre and terminate at Tampines North interchange. Yes, I think you have to do that, and more.
The perpetual motion machine
It was claimed that a million dollars in operating cost would be saved from the two closed TEL stations, which pales in comparison to the claimed $14 million required to maintain Services 171 and 700. But I suspect this is a number presented solely by the rail operator, counting only things like staff cost and electricity for lights and aircon. While it appears a small number and one which they can presumably easily absorb, there may be other expenses necessary to facilitate the opening of the station. Not all of them will be incurred by the LTA anyway, so asking them may be pointless since they wouldn’t have any idea what they will be.
As an example, I would hazard a guess that the effort to build Catholic JC a linkway to Mount Pleasant station will at the least involve three ministries — MOE as the manager of the school, MND as the custodian of the future HDB estate (and related construction sites), and MOT whose passengers will be the eventual users of any temporary walkway. Of course, the Municipal Services Office was set up to coordinate precisely such issues, so it’s not like such a whole-of-government issue isn’t noticed by the powers that be.
But still, presumably a walkway design would have to be accepted by MND and MOE (considering it involves both worksite management and student safety) before anything can happen, and depending on the owner and progress of works, the cost of the walkway may not necessarily be from the MOT budget. Shifting the walkway here and there as work progresses on the estate will also involve funds likely to be incurred by HDB and its contractors, as well as for its upkeep.
But what the LTA would have had to consider are the “big picture” investments definitely over $10 million — assuming the stations are kept open for 10 years while neighbouring developments are in progress. These include cancellation costs from change orders that have to be made should station fit-outs be cancelled (workers have to be redeployed, material orders to be cancelled, et cetera), and subsequent project expenses incurred to complete the works again at the later date. These will have to be weighed against things like operating cost of “parallel” bus services that can be shortened or eliminated with the opening of closed stations.
Some more nuanced moves can also be taken. In anticipation of the TEL, CCL Caldecott station was built with three escalators. The middle one has spent much of its time in hibernation for the past 10 years, and will probably be so for at least a few more months before TEL traffic picks up with the opening of Stage 3. A similar approach can be taken at less trafficked stations, by closing extra unused exits and reducing the amount of vertical circulation in constant operation.
Trail blazing
And of course, to resolve the abovementioned issues there’s always rerouting or changing bus routes. We do have integrated transport planning, after all, so adopting a “running a bus is cheaper than a train” mentality may not be so good for the financial sustainability of public transport as a whole especially with driverless train lines. For one, the operating subsidies given to Service 400 versus passenger load and demand can and may have been reconsidered in light of opening both Marina South and Gardens by the Bay stations, especially since the road infrastructure already exists.
But this is difficult and needs political support. It is thus useful to note that JRL timeline aside, this can be avoided in Tengah by planning with consideration of the presence of rail service from the very beginning — and now because of the JRL timeline, using the approach of rail bridging buses to allow the JRL to be integrated into service design principles. While this may appear wasteful, it would allow the JRL to be a immediate drop-in replacement for these temporary bus services, by just putting up signs at the bus stops telling people to go upstairs and take the train instead.
Such temporary services would look like a combination of the bridging bus strategy employed during disruptions, as well as the Temporary Shuttle Services implemented to connect residents to the growing MRT NSEWL network at least while it was under construction. Forcing transfers is never popular, I know, but I think such an approach allows both modular service planning and high-frequency service operation, instead of taking a progressive approach with the attendant public relations campaigns.
In the case of Tengah, there could be a service starting at Tengah Boulevard interchange, then calling only at the sites of Tengah Plantation and Tengah Park stations before going directly to Jurong East. Functionally, it could be an high-frequency express service, albeit something more like 179A which makes no stops between Pioneer MRT and NTU compared to actual additional-fare express services.
Perhaps it might then be easier to introduce the MRT service if everyone already had the idea that the MRT was coming — but this may need to be backed up with an actual effort to recover the schedule and finish the MRT on time, which is far easier said than done. I think it’s all about setting expectations.
