912 done right? Not?

A Mercedes Benz O405G ‘Habit’ bus plying Service 301 by Lester Thomas (d4rkf4ith)

One of Singapore Land Transport Authority’s (LTA) more controversial service enhancements, removing the terminating bus trip, 912E, for the continuous 912 route and splitting it into 3 separate routes.

A schematic diagram showing how a looping intratown route works

Just a brief explanation, for people living in non-SMRT majority districts, looping intratown routes, are such that passes the interchange twice, in a loop fashion and has no ending terminals, until a driver sets the destination display to ‘xxxE’, which signals to passengers that the bus will terminate once it reaches the interchange and would not proceed further on to the other side of the loop. People living in the Eastern end would recognize the ‘T’ terminating plate which is the same theory as this.

A schematic diagram showing how service 912 works

The diagram shows schematically how each route runs, 912 being the full original service (unaffected by the service enhancement), 912A and B serving the Eastern and Western parts of Woodlands respectively and 912M being the peak hour weekday service cutting short its route to Southern Marsiling.

Service Frequencies

A table showing bus frequencies for 912 and 912x routes

912A and B replaces the 912E terminating trip, making it a fully operational service instead of one just for bus withdrawals and 912, downsizing in frequency.

The likely rationale for this, is to rectify the persisting issue of a lack of buses on either ends of the services as 912 was very prone to bus bunching, with multiple buses coming after a 20min lack of buses before the service enhancement.

Through splitting the bus service, if there is any incidents along the way that causes bus timings to be affected, only the east or west zone will be affected, thus, minimizing the rippling effect. Service 912 has also thought to be retained to serve as a connector between the Eastern and Western regions, though, it is one the longest services to get from Admiralty MRT or the Woodlands Train Checkpoint to the central Woodlands MRT.

Criticisms

While the rationale of keeping 912 is unclear, I have certainly not understood the significance of such a link, since it is just a waste of operating resources of 4 to 6 buses on the full 912 loop service, while also spending quite a fair amount of resources on 912A and 912B.

Due to the clearly low service intervals on 912, how is a senior citizen, or a student, likely to wait 15mins or even up to 25mins for a bus just to connect across the zones. The current fare system penalizes passengers and does not allow transfers between sub-services under a parent service (ie. You will be charged a new fare if you transfer between any 912x service and 912). The clear thought of waiting so long is crazy and resources used is not optimal.

A long route has also, been acknowledged, by the experts to be harder to keep buses on schedule. (The article linked may help!) Coupled with the older ‘bendy’ articulated buses that are notoriously slow and inefficient, but helps to allow quicker alighting for passengers, this usually leads to a lot of cases of bus bunching as they are almost good enough for maintaining on schedule and not speed up for lost time due to its poor acceleration. (Newer MAN A24 articulated buses demonstrates otherwise, on the other hand)

Such buses on 912 could be cut down and placed elsewhere on longer haul services or on its buddy, 911, which faces an issue of rapid passenger queues during peak hour. While the convenient link is much appreciated, it does not, in my opinion, translate to a true benefit, if 912A and 912B are the main services of the route running at higher intervals compared to its parent service, 912.

Solution

One of the solution would be to split its child services, 912A and 912B to services 905 and 906 (which I will use to illustrate it easily).

905 and 906 are separate services, which could be run with buses crossing over each other (this is a common practice in the industry) where it needs it. It would still be run like the way 912A and 912B does, just with new service numbers that will allow passengers, if needed, to transfer if they need to get on to the opposite zone of the current 912 service.

Through the renumbering and discontinuation of parent service 912, passengers can get to enjoy more stable frequencies and even increased intervals, due to the withdrawal of up to 5 buses from its parent service. This could also reduce the amount of waiting time and increase passenger satisfaction levels by reducing the amount of time taken for a passenger to board a bus (which I really think is a good measure in our hot and humid Singapore), which is logical for a fast-paced Singapore.

Conclusion

The implementation of the enhancement of service 912 could be done better, which could benefit operating companies and end users.

What are your views about the implementation of the service enhancement? Views are definitely welcome!