Space on trains
In our case, space is a premium. This can have far larger effects.
It’s probably fair to say that I am a horrible person. My reaction to the “postponement” of priority cabins for special needs passengers probably ranges somewhere between a sense of schadenfreude and “it’s a bad idea from the beginning”.
Well, this is complex. Lest the NGOs and other charitable organizations come after me, let me explain myself. For now, even if we can do it just by fiat, I’d argue that we can ill afford to do this. The only thing that might make sense to me is women only carriages, but that still leaves the question of enforcement open, especially since we use open walk-through cars here (without even fire separation doors as in Japan).
Barely keeping afloat
I raise this picture in my defense:
Much like on C951 trains, the 2-seaters at the ends of the train cars next to the inter-car gangway or cab door are gone. They’ve even gone further than C951 by also cutting some of the 7-seater seats down to 5-seater with a bumrest, in a manner similar to the C751B trains formerly fitted with luggage racks.
Why go so far to introduce such “multi-use areas”? I don’t think this is pure altruism. Rather, this may be somewhat of a replacement for the so-called “high capacity trains” (to borrow SGTrains’ term) where a whole bench of seating is removed, to be packed with people in peak hours. I view this in the same vein as why the first batches of wheelchair accessible single-deck buses procured in the mid-2000s had two wheelchair bays — not entirely because of better customer service to the less able-bodied, but to allow more standing passengers to be carried. Both bus companies then went back to only one wheelchair bay, filling the other with seats, before the recent LTA decrees to have two bays again.
Matters could get even worse on the 3-car lines where such opportunities are limited — after all, one cannot take away too many seats. On the 3-car lines, blocking off an entire car is a significant cut in space otherwise usable by typical passengers, and not for a lot of benefit. Additional trips may have to be run, which keep load factors low, and then they complain about the need for subsidies again. While flippable seats may help, to what extent they can may be debatable, given how they’ve been used on the C151C so far.
It might probably say something when even MTR doesn’t care; the most they have is a quiet car for people who don’t want to be bothered by announcements. I get the good faith behind this, but in the overall context of more people using public transport at all hours of the day — with an chance of increasing population offsetting whatever flexi-work policies the government manages to get companies to adopt — it’s probably going to be ineffective with the additional capacity needed more.
Stand-up comedy gag
It’s sufficiently fair to say that if they need to resort to this, Stand-up Stacy hasn’t been doing her job. Don’t say she ought to be fired, I’ll give her some slack and say that her job is hard enough in changing old hardened Singaporean values, where the soft way typically doesn’t work. After all, that’s why we’re a fine city.
While making an attempt to cater to the less fortunate is to be commended, let’s not forget how we got here in the first place — first it was “Priority Seating”, then it became “Reserved Seating” with an appropriate increase in the level of “importance”, then to the current imagery.
“Priority cars” are a level of escalation I don’t think we really need. Given the above issues with capacity provision and dropping numbers of seating in favor of standing space, things may well get to a point where most people have to stand and every seat becomes a priority seat. I don’t believe you need fancy graphics or enforcement for that, since the fundamental problem is that no one cares in the first place, despite the best efforts of the bureaucrats.
With enforcement, capacity might drop if people are encouraged to consciously avoid the “priority car” if they don’t need it; without enforcement it’s basically the same as the status quo with Stand Up Stacy decals designed to make people feel bad about themselves, especially in the peak hour when everyone just packs in and no one cares. I’d think that women only cars is the only “special treatment” that could probably fill up a whole car even with enforcement, but that depends on the amount of agitation by AWARE and maybe several statistics about inappropriate behavior on trains.
Personally, I haven’t seen even those people who could find the space to be of use, such as wheelchair users, specifically go and seek out the wheelchair space currently provided. Part of it may be due to the locations of lifts in stations, or that existing train cabins are already spacious enough such that a responsibly parked stroller or wheelchair will not pose too much disruption to passenger flow.
Not the solution you’re looking for
Since we have solutions looking for problems, and they think they can afford to do all of the above, we might as well use this opportunity to solve another one — the active mobility policy. If they think we have so much unused space on trains that we can afford to offer “priority cabins” that aren’t any more than nice interior decor, then we might as well put it to good use.
In Singapore, train stations typically offer significant amounts of bike parking space, even going to the extent of providing that space underground. You leave your bike there and you go where you need to go by train, completing your journey on foot or by some other medium. However, I’d argue that this may be a regional outlier. KL, Jakarta, and Taipei all offer the possibility of bringing full-size bikes onto the RTS network in off peak hours, if for an additional price.
In Singapore, however, you have this:
Funny, yes, but not very safe, and it would probably be better to provide some dedicated infrastructure for such uses. I’d think that if we’re going to have special cabins that aren’t anything more than cute decals, we might as well cater to the cycling crowd too and hopefully see if we can serve more people with such “special needs”. All the more if we both encourage active mobility as well as changing commute patterns — given the boom and subsequent shared-biking bust, and the fact that lesser journeys may only need a bicycle at one end, I consider this a reasonable demand.
But even if pushing bicycles onboard selected cabins were allowed, I think this will have mixed results in practice, closer to the poorer end of the scale. Without? I don’t think it will work much in peaks, when the decision to build lower capacity leaves people with no choice. Perhaps in this case, much like flip up seats, they’d be better spending their money on more public outreach even if that’s “throwing good money after bad”. After all, they did manage to get people to queue up.
