The Springleaf bus hub
Here’s another tale of a missed opportunity.
The opening of TEL3 will make the rest of the line more useful as well. This explains potential increases in traffic at Woodlands South and south of Mayflower station, with Woodlands and some Ang Mo Kio residents getting a faster and less congested route to the CBD. But what about Springleaf and Lentor? Lentor station is quieter, but the straightforward answer is that developments are now underway in the area. Things there will probably change in a few years.
What about Springleaf, though? This is where things get much more complex. There are squares on the board, but nothing concrete, and the shophouses on the other side of the road lend the character to the area, so they can’t exactly go. They’re not going, in any case.
Transits and transfers
I said in the blog post on Yishun that it might be worth it to have several bus services departing Yishun calling at Springleaf station on the way to the expressway or Yio Chu Kang, instead of Lentor Avenue. I think I need to flesh this out some more, since this approach works in Sembawang as well.
Located shortly after the point where Sembawang Road turns into Upper Thomson Road, Springleaf station is conveniently sited to serve both Sembawang and Yishun towns. I find it hard to believe they might have sited a station there on the power of future development plans alone, with Springleaf Prata and other nearby food outlets enough of a motivator in the interim. A large part of the 400m radius of the station is zoned as green land anyway that is planned to be left untouched, so even that may be limited.
How can this be done? Well, firstly, Sembawang Road goes to Sembawang. 167 and 980 both take the straight route all the way down from Sembawang to Upper Thomson and Thomson Roads. I’m not going to kid anyone that service consolidation and reduction in bus service levels won’t happen, but some level of community service is likely to remain for the single-family homes along Upper Thomson Road who won’t see a station until Upper Thomson station. After all, the TEL doesn’t run there, it detours through Ang Mo Kio Town instead.
Those going all the way through to Thomson Road might help supplement the demand here, as there’s no TEL along Thomson Road either; albeit those going to Novena or Tan Tock Seng Hospital would likely already use the NSL from their respective towns. But north of Springleaf station there could be an even better level of service. Maybe assuming 980 is the service retained, one might be able to see a 980A that only supplements the Sembawang Road sector during peak hours. This increased traffic could also provide a reason to extend existing bus lanes near Chong Pang up to Sembawang and down to Springleaf to improve travel times as well.
From the Yishun direction, things are even better. 169 and 860 already serve Springleaf station from Yishun, and rerouting any Lentor Avenue services here would also increase the level of service offered in this direction. The only issue is that the point of failure is largely still Yishun Bus Interchange and its surroundings, but as mentioned in the earlier post it’s also possible to fix that.
But what for?
The most obvious answer to that question is that with these provisions, the TEL will be better able to play an effective role in relieving the NSL especially on Bad Days, with Sembawang and Yishun commuters able to take the TEL to Springleaf and transfer to buses. This should be similar to the option of DTL3 + bus available in the east.
It hit me afterward as well that one of the benefits having 39 and 85 call here means the TEL can be a potential relief for the NEL as well. Instead of taking the already very crowded NEL to town and changing at Outram Park, likely to itself be a very busy station in future, Sengkang and Punggol residents might be able to take 39 and 85 to Springleaf station and get the TEL from there. I get that this is a very large detour, so it might only be useful for a handful of journeys where one might have to backtrack from Outram Park or Dhoby Ghaut, or up towards Woodlands. By itself, this may be flimsy.
Secondly, the final design of the Mandai Wildlife Precinct and whether the area provides internal transfer between the main Zoo/Night Safari area and the new Bird Park area closer to Mandai Road (which they apparently call the West Node) might reduce the need for buses to go all the way into Mandai Lake Road. This may make it possible to engineer a merger between services 138 and 927, for a new direct service between Ang Mo Kio and Choa Chu Kang via the zoo.
And if that is done, providing access to services 39 and 85 at Springleaf could also mean a trip to Choa Chu Kang is only one transfer from Sengkang/Punggol —39/85/perhaps 965 then the merged 138/927; providing much better justification than just “TEL can be a reliever for NEL too” if there are bus transfers further afield. The lesson for us here is that you don’t have to take the train if you take a bus to an MRT station.
Sure, you can already do this at Khatib station, but with the increasing amount of passengers within Yishun Town expected from redevelopment, is that really a good idea? Khatib station is likely to have its own issues with demand on the bus stops from commuters switching to local bus services to get home, especially if they’re reconfigured in such a way that less passengers have a reason to use Yishun station.
Its location along the congested Yishun Ave 2 and the need for buses to continue on to Yishun Bus Interchange further up the road doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence either, even if bus lanes exist along the corridor to help decrease journey times. The hard part is presumably cutting across into the turn lane to get into the interchange proper. They could adjust the rules of the junction at the interchange entrance, such as a dedicated phase for buses to directly enter from the bus lane, but that could be another can of worms.
The need to build
In a similar vein, while service 860 might facilitate better access from Springleaf station to Yishun Town, it has a long tail leading all the way to Yio Chu Kang. This is likely because it needs somewhere to terminate and allow drivers a place to rest and presumably the nearest possible place to do so is Yio Chu Kang. One cannot really say for sure how useful this connection is, when Lentor and Mayflower stations provide better connections to Ang Mo Kio from the TEL, and 138/269 do the rest of the local catchment job.
Opinions might differ whether service 860 can be shortened to Springleaf station, in a style similar to the earlier-mentioned “980A” or any form of new service that could be run from Sembawang Town. But this conversation cannot be had without the presence of facilities to allow buses to turn around in the first place.
This is a bigger problem. Along the three newer MRT lines, none were built with the lines, which means intermodal connections have to be done by services running through streetside stops to terminals further afield, which may not be that much of a good idea if buses are going to run decently empty there. And today, there are only one or two places where new bus facilities better than connecting streetside stops, where services can terminate, have concrete plans — Beauty World and Bedok South.
Even Bedok South is contentious in that its proximity to Upper East Coast bus terminal means we are likely to see Upper East Coast terminal just shift operations to Bedok South when that is done. This may mean that there will likely be no net increase in bus facilities; DTL passengers may also be inconvenienced if they have to switch at Sungei Bedok for 1 stop on the TEL. So in conclusion only Beauty World is really getting any new form of bus service.
Considering that having only LRT service didn’t stop them from consolidating nearby terminals into Bukit Panjang bus interchange in the 1990s, and that the whole idea of a “bus interchange” pre-dates the MRT with the first being built in Jurong in the late 1970s, I can think of several other locations along the medium-capacity MRT lines where bus terminating facilities should have been built. Dakota, Haw Par Villa, Geylang Bahru, Bedok North, Mount Pleasant, even bringing back the former Marine Parade bus terminal.
At least lessons ought to be learnt. This is an especially acute issue with the medium-capacity MRT lines, where there are a considerable portion of CCL and DTL stations that are literally less used than stops on the Sengkang/Punggol LRT. Much potential for bus transfers to increase the usage of these lines, especially the DTL, is squandered with the lack of clear bus facilities at these stations.
It’s never too late
For newer developments, Tengah, like Bukit Panjang, will naturally receive bus facilities as part of the greater Tengah New Town Centre project; although when that is done it could just be considered as a relocation of the currently under-construction Tengah Boulevard bus interchange. Likewise, we are likely to see a permanent bus interchange built as a part of a mixed-used development near CRL Tampines North —albeit also likely to be a relocation of the current Tampines North temporary interchange.
Better links and maybe even consolidation of facilities can also be constructed between MRT stations and nearby bus terminals, an issue not unique to the medium-capacity lines since there are examples along the EWL too. I’ve written at length about Buona Vista, for one. Queen Street, or its potential replacement, can also connect straight to Bugis station as well with scaled-up operations over and above Service 170. An attempt could be made to try to stop as many Tuas Bus Terminal services as possible at Tuas Link station; or perhaps even build a bridge from the elevated station concourse to the bus terminal.
And something can be done about how to get to Marina Centre Terminal bus services from Promenade station, especially those ending at the bus stop named “Promenade Stn”; which while sited on top of the station proper, requires a detour to an exit 150–200m away in order to actually get into.
New rail projects do increase the resilience of the network to Bad Days, planned or unplanned. But thinking about how bus transfers work with these new projects, and what new infrastructure has to be provided, will also be key if we’re going to want to do it optimally. Springleaf is just one of these examples, where things could be much better with infrastructure.
