The carrot and the stick
Fare review gives us the opportunity to fix policy failures by the LTA and the Transport Ministry.
We must recognize the shaping power of policy. These policy failures are the cause of policymakers’ current malaise, after all. Fix these issues, and they will be able to shape behaviors that are more amenable towards their vision of the way life should be. The Fare Review Exercise provides the opportunity to do so, and to pass it up would be a waste.
After all, we cannot fault people too much for making noise when the status quo is upended. If policies do not catch up with the changing reality of services provided, then we have a problem as people stand only to lose from a given service change. And when that happens, inevitably they will scream.
Unchanging mindsets
Thinking of public transport as a public service means we should put a priority on maximising coverage — to tick as many boxes as possible. Increasingly spreading our resources thinner and thinner is a recipe for disaster. Point to point car replacement buses to various parts of Singapore from a single location is not a public service. A Bus to Order connecting an MRT station to a new BTO estate, on the other hand, is.
Closely spaced MRT stations serving dense housing estates is maximizing coverage, where people can walk to higher order public transport without being forced into car or bus dependency. Say what you want about Teck Ghee station, but with plenty of 40 floor BTOs nearby, it’s hard not to justify a station there. And Turf City will likely go the same way, with similarly high density planned around the current Sixth Avenue and future Turf City stations — not possible had the stations been built elsewhere, or not at all.
Even if one wants to discount the use of trains, a hub and spoke transport system can still emerge. Quite a few of Hong Kong’s long distance express services were born out of service reorganization efforts from cleaning up complex and confusing route systems, in an effort to attract passengers. These express services call only at major bus hubs, and Hong Kong Island or downtown Kowloon, and use local feeders to connect housing estates. Then again, Hong Kong is not investing in its rail system as heavily as us, with its only new line being the Northern Link, and small extensions to the Tung Chung and Tuen Ma lines to new urban developments.
We could still see some of the same here. Bus laybys already allow a moving bus to pass a stopped bus. The rest is a matter of fare policy and which stops you can get away with skipping without local MPs banging down the office doors — but what happened with Service 43e doesn’t give me much hope. And history does not stand on the side of premium-fare express services that really do skip stops.
After all, car-centric traffic policy in Singapore, where keeping speeds high with road widening and ERP is the norm, also enables faster bus journeys, as car infrastructure is bus infrastructure. They would do well to put a value on higher tiers of bus service, which can produce faster journeys where one even gets a seat to boot. And if people aren’t willing to pay that price, then so be it, as coverage requirements are still met through trains and short distance bus services.
Ultimately, if we don’t want to pay, then we have spoken with our wallets, and going straight to withdrawing a route and skipping the intermediate steps of service reduction is understandable. It probably says something when service levels of Service 89e were mostly untouched between introduction in 2005, up to 2021. Real growth only came when Loyang Avenue was closed to cars for CRL construction, giving the choice of paying for express bus fare, or getting stuck in jams.
To make this more palatable, perhaps a liberalization of transfer rules may help mitigate the impact of the inevitable increase in single trip fares, by allowing two single trips to be joined together. It will benefit those working from home, as well as senior citizens and students who travel mainly within their community, or even to reinvigorate our downtown with the many office workers who take short MRT hops elsewhere for lunch.
The current complexity of transfer rules can probably be simplified down to just two things — two hours from first entry, and 45 minutes since the last alighting. That means no more 15 minute transfers between MRT lines, no more waiting for a bus with a different number, no more loss of transfers between express and local services.
Promoting routes to higher tiers of service can be a powerful tool in post-rail opening service adjustment schemes to ensure the continued sustainability of routes with lesser passengers, especially if local political interests insist on keeping the direct buses around. If it’s clear that the public don’t want to pay if they have any other choice, who else can we blame for the failure and subsequent elimination of express buses — all the more so when express buses are made more attractive and accessible and yet people still don’t use them.
Unmet expectations
Another example of how policy must adapt to reality is that we can’t simply translate 1974’s policy of buying concession stamps at a ticket office, to a machine transaction in 2024. We’ve come a long way in other means, why not this?
Someone today may ride service 52 from Bishan St 22 all the way to Ngee Ann Polytechnic. But come 2032, policymakers may expect them to take a bus to CRL Bright Hill station, go three stops on the CRL to Maju, then walk to the NP campus. Whilst the CRL may easily shave off half the travel time, it also results in increased costs; especially for students who can buy a single-mode concession for a significant discount. And not every student may want to make the tradeoff — after all, different courses have different workloads, and not everyone will spend 11 hours a day in a lab and want to get home to their beds ASAP. Some may still have the time.
Nor could you turn service 52 into a premium-fare express route without complaints, even if it’s justified by its usage of the Lornie Highway— the poor usage of 74e and 151e an unfortunate precedent. Policymakers should ensure there is a premium on the value of a seat compared to standing for three stops on the CRL and then walking back. But express routes aren’t covered by the concession pass system, so it’s understandable that those relying on passes will scream.
So what needs to happen? New account-based ticketing paradigms need to be made use of; the current flawed concession pass system should be scrapped for anyone above 16 and replaced with Singpass account-based entitlements and fare caps; the Green Man Plus scheme should also be reassessed, perhaps with longer pedestrian crossing times across the board. The PTC already points out that the Adult Monthly Travel Pass is underused — while raising awareness may help, the hoops to jump through to get one (and maintain yet another card) can be a turnoff. Fare caps remove this problem totally.
Apart from massively simplifying decisions for those concerned about the dollars and cents, fare caps can also cover express, City Direct, and other non-basic services, making them more appealing to both commuter and policymaker, compared to giving people the expectation they can travel one-seat to anywhere on a basic fare. Perhaps fare caps may also justify another attempt at night services again, when it’s far more accessible.
But the concerns of those reliant on cheap single-mode fares need to be addressed; as a replacement, some kind of short-distance pass that covers the cost of intra-town and short-distance travel, much like what the WMATA in Washington DC offers, can be implemented. This is now technically possible since the system knows where you’ve been and the best combination of trip fares. Any trips over the pass distance can then be covered by distance fares. This can perhaps also be expanded to adults, senior citizens, and Workfare recipients.
Someone who works from home or attends online lectures three days a week all the more should not own a car and should be encouraged to use public transport, and short distances passes will help these people too.
To each according to need
Of course, this will not pay for itself. Something they can do is to extend the distance fare bands past the current 40km cap for adults — adding fare bands all the way to 60km or perhaps even further. This way, fares can also be increased in the 20–30km range while not penalizing those who already pay more for shorter journeys. But is this really fair, when it is the working class that use public transport more and already need to spend more time to travel to industrial sites in the far west of Jurong and Tuas?
Most importantly, the groups that benefit most from such a parallel transport system may not be adult full fare payers, for whom peak-period services may get stuck in traffic jams anyway especially as we reclaim roads — but students and the elderly, who enjoy concession fares capped at significantly lower levels, and are also more likely to travel in off-peak periods when roads are emptier. Wide roads designed for high peak hour demand will speed up in the off peak when there are lesser cars.
Perhaps a relook of the concession fare structure, especially for express services, is also overdue. Back in 2022, the government refused to reduce petrol taxes, claiming that would be “a subsidy on private transport” and benefit “a relatively small but generally better-off group.” With rail expansion, we should view public transport through the same lens. Along with more express services, increasing express bus fares for this group past the existing 7.2km fare cap would be a fairer way. Those who need the lower fares have the option of changing their lifestyle by switching to MRT and short distance services. Those who continue to use express bus services can still receive subsidised fares, but not as much as they’re charged by the full distance scale.
Similarly, we should also examine who qualifies and how. Thus, I view the Transport Minister’s announcement to explore the possibility of extending concession fares to school leavers in the same lens. It’s not just the four months from January to May. The last O-Level paper is typically in mid-November, and polytechnics begin classes in mid-April. Someone might look for a part time job or work casually during these five months, and a likely reason why adult fares are charged from February until school starts may be due to these students being more likely to be part of the workforce; reasons may change over time and over generations, but the trend remains.
Perhaps a concession the PTC could give — as the Transport Minister has kindly requested — would be to grant school leavers 25% off as with Workfare recipients, or even 50% off like senior citizens, instead of the even more deeply discounted student fare scheme, which assumes students have no income. Maybe this can be extended to NSFs too — NSFs pay adult fares, yet NS allowances are lower than what one might earn in a part-time job (even for a Lieutenant in a combat unit!), and MINDEF doesn’t allow servicemen to moonlight. Lower per-trip fares also benefit those who stay in camp, travelling only to and from camp and during weekends — not enough to justify passes even at discounted pricing.
Ultimately, the issue here is that we don’t have a proper youth travel scheme, and have to use student and military service status to make up for that. Are there fairer ways to do it?
From each according to use
Our fare policy shapes our behavior, after all. The initial introduction of distance fares was to help drive a modal shift to trains, by removing the financial penalty incurred when switching modes. It can even now be said that tunnelling under obstacles like Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park and the CCNR, can make trains a cheaper alternative for the user, compared to buses that use roads and so must detour around those obstacles.
Adapting fare policies to change passenger behavior may help prepare for a drastically changed future once the CRL opens. It will shorten travel times for many Singaporeans. But in order for the CRL to be successful, we must understand that behaviors with rapid transit are very much unlike driving. Transit-oriented developments like Bayshore, Turf City, and perhaps Yew Tee, where the MRT goes through the centre of the estate, but car traffic goes to the outside of the estate due to the hierarchy of roads, also complicate bus route design anyway.
Thus, a more nuanced approach is needed, instead of punitive, blanket fare increases that affect everyone regardless of the quality of public transport available to them — whether one has 5 routes to the CBD at the bus stop downstairs, or only a Bus to Order to the nearest MRT station. There is no reason why someone who has to use the LRT in Punggol has to subsidize car replacement buses in Choa Chu Kang. A more blatant example of transport inequality can also be seen in Marine Parade.
As this blog has long believed, fixing inequalities in public transport is necessary to preserve affordability, in the face of rising inflation and rising operator wages, amidst a cost of living crisis. We would do well to avoid the fate of Hong Kong, where unequal fare systems means that there’s serious talk of doubling the senior citizen public transport fare, punishing all the elderly regardless of their travel habits.
If people want choice, we should provide it in a way that shapes behavior, where they can change their habits and reap the savings that have been passed on. Or they can continue to follow old paradigms but which they must support themselves. If people want to build their lives around one-seat bus rides every half an hour, and if they’re willing to pay the literal price; the “use it or lose it” principle then applies. Likewise, redundancy costs extra — people cannot expect to “have redundancy” for the current low prices of public transport. Something has to give.
And this approach is also ideologically consistent with how cash fares are significantly higher than card fares. Those who insist on using cash, can pay for cash handing service themselves.
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