The problem of nationalised 'public' transport

BillyBong SG

Two things that have regressed since SG made the leap forward have been the lack of competition in the transportation system, and the obvious lack of intelligence in problem solving implementation.

It must read like a red flag each time someone writes in the papers concerning the obviously failed concept of the ERP. In the past week alone there was a flurry of letters denouncing the flawed concept:

Evening ERP on CTE ineffective after gantry

MANY motorists choose to pay the evening ERP charges on the Central Expressway (CTE) heading north towards Yishun and beyond, hoping to have a smoother and faster ride home.
Traffic approaching the gantry just before the ingress into Braddell Road is presently containable and smooth. Pass this gantry and the volume of traffic starts to build up again as one approaches the egress for traffic joining the CTE from Braddell Road. This heavy build-up becomes worse as one approaches the Ang Mo Kio avenues 1 and 3 ingresses and egresses. Sometimes, traffic slows to less than 30kmh.

To be fair to those who choose to pay the ERP charges, there should also be gantries located at the egresses into the CTE at the Braddell Road and Ang Mo Kio Avenue 1 junctions.

Many motorists have actually detoured to avoid the gantry point, only to join in at the above two locations.

Paying motorists should be accorded more fairness so that they do not have to contend with a build-up of traffic again immediately after going past the gantry.

Chia Yong Soong

ERP isn't working, rein in number of cars instead

WHAT is the main objective for the implementation of ERP and the subsequent increase in charges? Is it to reduce congestion on the roads and expressways? If that is so, then it has not been effective. Increasing the charges will cause traffic to be diverted to other roads and consequential bottlenecks and more congestion.
During my daily drive home on the northbound CTE, it is very common to see motorists driving extremely fast either to get past the ERP gantry before the operational hour or to beat the higher peak-hour rate. They switch lanes recklessly in order to get ahead, posing a hazard to other road users.

If the Government aims to reduce congestion, it should look at reducing the number of cars by controlling the number of COEs and raising taxes on new cars. At the same time, it could promote use of public transport by improving the infrastructure. Fewer cars on the roads will also help save the earth.

Cindy Brown (Mrs)

Installing ERP gantries and raising ERP rates every quarter not the solution to traffic jams

I refer to Mrs Cindy Brown's letter, 'ERP isn't working, rein in number of cars instead' (ST, Feb 3), and could not agree with her more that the ERP's aim of easing congestion on the roads in Singapore is not working.
I live in Punggol and it takes my husband and I one hour to get to and from work in Shenton Way. The irony is that it takes the same amount of time to travel via the LRT or bus followed by the journey from Punggol MRT station to Tanjong Pagar station.

Why drive when you can take public transport, you say? Well, someone from the Land Transport Authority should try taking the westbound train from Tanjong Pagar to Outram station or from Tanjong Pagar to Dhoby Ghaut station (transfer at Raffles Place) during the peak periods of 6pm to 6.45pm. Often, you could not even board the trains as they are packed. I really sympathise with the other commuters' discomfort as their train journey is longer than mine.

At the end of a long working day, Singaporeans would just like to enjoy a quick journey home to unwind and have dinner with their loved ones. With the Government also encouraging companies to promote work-life balance, they should abolish the ERP gantry (installed in August 2005) on north-bound CTE in the evenings. Why leave office by 6.30pm but in turn get penalised for going home early? Have we not paid enough for the COE and annual road tax?

The peak-hour traffic is worsening due to more cars populating our roads. With the recent dip in COE prices, many people have decided to buy a car. Perhaps the authorities should spend more time to build an efficient world-class transport system in order to persuade its citizens to switch to public transport. In the meantime, installing ERP gantries and raising ERP rates every quarter is not the solution.

Wendy Lee Fei Yin (Mdm)

BillyBong SG

Despite the obvious, our 'brilliant' LTA nerve center continues to insist that increasing ERP charges is the way to go. Alas, they have been debunked each time they throw a stack of statistical timings at the public, showing perceived improvements in average speed rather than REAL improvements as a direct result of their price hikes.

What has happened is that MONEY (and lots more to come) has been centered as the sole solution to all problems; it be like throwing money at a problem and hoping (with fingers crossed) that the problem will go 'away'.

At the same time, our govt has given the go-ahead to reduce COE prices all round, a couter-productive act which negates the overall aim of improving traffic.

Is this the indirect fallout of the failed Shin Corp takeover, where national reserves were wasted in a spending spree and now the govt needs to refill the coffers? Another expensive tuition loan perhaps in which the real losers are the people?

Atobe SG

The problem with the CTE is that by the time it was built, its original plan has been implemented almost five years late.

As soon as the CTE was opened, we see an almost immediate clogging of this expressway that was supposed to alleviate the traffic woes along other secondary roads linking the north residential areas to the economic zones in the city center located in the South; and the industrial areas in the west.

If one looked at the AYE and the PIE, it was already going through the second or third stage of improvement during the mid-1980s, when the CTE was under construction.

The observations and improvements made to the PIE and AYE was not included in the CTE design.

The width of each traffic lane along the CTE is much narrower than that of the AYE, and certain stretches of the PIE has lanes that are woefully miserly in width.

Even the design of the flyovers and road profile is outrageously unsafe, as the road camber is designed to create an accident.

The Benjamin Sheares Bridge that link the ECP to the AYE is about the only concrete structure that has taken into consideration the 'banking angle or slope' of the road profile that allows a car to continue its speed of 80 or 90 kmh as it go round the bend.

Most other roads are banked the wrong direction that force the car to tilt towards the outer side of the cornering motion.

Could it be that the Benjamin Sheares Bridge was built by Japanese who understand the road camber and banking angle to assist car drivers to go through a bend without slowing down ?

While LTA has design expressways to move traffic in volume, one will expect that the speed limits could be similarly raised to get people moving along faster, so as to get out of the expressways sooner.

Unfortunately, the LTA and the Traffic Police seems to defeat the original purpose of building expressways.

They will install 'speed cameras' that serves as a throttle-valve that suddenly reduce the fast flow into a trickle at the point of the camera location.

For every car that slows down suddenly before the camera, and pick-up speed again after the camera location, this proces will involve at least 40 seconds per car. This action will correspondingly be accumulated into a multiplier effect that is repeated by all the cars behind that will respond in the same manner.

This has caused the traffic to slow down unnecessarily, and have resulted in small pile-ups when drivers unexpected hit the brakes before the cameras.

Do the traffic planners also drive, and understand the problems of driving in Singapore ?

BillyBong SG

Alas, the current number of road works on the Benjamin Henry Sheares Bridge has ultimately served only to clog traffic at their critical times: lane narrowing coupled by traffic merging from the filter lanes is a classic example heading towards the ECP.

In the case of CTE being opened late, it seems more as a case of too little too late, but better than nothing. I cannot fault the planners for failing to forsee the impact of a surge in vehicular traffic in the 80s to 90s but what i find most disturbing is the lack of a penetrating solution that alleviates the entire traffic problem.

If drivers are being asked (no, demanded) to pay for smoother traffic, it is doubly likely that many would be willing to part with $3-4 of ERP fees, if the result is 'express' flow to the City.

The problem is, one pays the levy, and still gets stuck in 30-40 km/h slow moving traffic: where's the incentive to pay and pay if it doesn't solve the problem? In addition, a single accident creates mayhem and ulimately defeats the perceived 'advantage' supposedly created by ERP.

Any implementation now will be deemed too late, but perhaps the authorities could consider designing a 'skybridge': creating an overhead 'expressway bridge' with very limited filters to create single directional flow of traffic. An example of this can be seen on the Oakland Bay bridge leading into and out of San Francisco. Traffic in this case is limited to a single direction on both the lower and upper lanes, expanding the limited space on the bridge and allowing traffic to flow in the same direction across the entire bridge.

In the case of the CTE, which at the moment runs on 3 lanes per direction, an overhead sky bridge designed solely to take traffic out of the city could release as many as 6-7 lanes (including shoulders) heading into the city alone.

If volume of vehicles is the problem, this is one suggestion to maximise the use of the CTE.

The other aspect is to review the policy of using speed cameras along the expressways. They are clearly counter-productive in their role and i would really like to see the traffic police release the statistics of both speedsters vs the overall accident figures caused by speeding to determine if there is indeed a correlation, of which the TP has put to effective use.

ShutterBug SG

I feel no amount of guesswork is necessary that, they are, suddenly implementinmg these barrage of increases with rgards the messy Shin Corp deal in order to refill their coffers.

the Bear SG

This may sound off-topic, but it would seem that our roads are clogged.

The powers may not see it this way but the MRT is also crammed during peak hours. The picture in today's TODAY newspaper about a bunch of people cramming a carriage as a stunt was missed by me until a friend told me that it was actually a stunt. The carriage looked like an ordinary day in the train during peak hours.

Which brings me to this...

We're 4.5 million. The powers say 6.5 million in the near future.

Is the infrastructure capable of handling the 45% increase in population?

Ito_^ SG

i tot only the car was the stunt. -_-

BillyBong SG

Would it be any surprise at all that our LTA and transport ministry have NO CLUE as to how to manage an infrastructure that needs constant reinforcement?

After the MRT was built in the late 80s and early 90s, what new transportation system has the transport ministries come up with? Or did they choose to rest on their laurels and give themselves the typical 'pat on the back' for a supposed 'job well done'?

We have moved 16 years since then, and only in the last 3 years did ministry planners realise the need for a circle line to support the already clogged EW and NS lines of the MRT? Have they any respect for schedules? Judging by the numerous delays faced by circle line and the recent tunnel collapse, there does not appear to be a proper system in place to manage the nemerous contractors in place, leading to finger pointing and the 'blame game' being employed to get the public 'off their backs'.

Apart from lip service being afforded to the public, what real plans do they have to cater to a population of 6.5 million? Even as PM Lee annouces that his new budget will offset GST for the lower income group (another govt lip service without substantiated plans), there does not seem to be any hope of a roadmap to handle the congested needs of our transport system.

If the current Transport minister is anything like Yeo Cheow Tong and Mah Bow Tan, can we expect the same Hoo and Ha boo-boos as his predecessors?

Fingolfin_Noldor SG

I so dislike taking the MRT in the morning as the carriages are so bloody full I'd have to miss a couple trains. In the end, I'd rather go take a bus.

Damn it, does no one up there know how bad the situation is?

ShutterBug SG

Oh those 'up there', will aptly say; "Adapt with the changes... we will continue to further enhance train schedules during peak hours..."

Since they don't use the MRT, and gets driven around, I wonder - what do they know about ADAPTATION to a transport system that's fast becoming over overloaded?? Not to mention standards of services, and punctuality.

I drive all the time, and even so, I find driving during peak hours is counter productive - I often have to leave for an appointment that's crtitcal, at least one hour before peak, or way ahead in advance.

ERP & COE, they're just excuses to make more money - it curbs & solves nothing!

the Bear SG

does it matter to them when they are chauffered around? Laughing

it would be good if ministers were made to live like a normal person, taking public transport to work and working like a normal person for a month every year, having to eat at hawker centres (non-aircon ones), having to go to the provision shop or wet market for groceries, cooking for themselves.. basically doing what Joe Average and Jane Ordinary does... WITHOUT all their bootlickers smoothing their path for them...

you think it would be too great a shock for them?

i think they'd be reduced to being curled up in a foetal position, crying to themselves Laughing

Atobe SG

Will it surprise anyone that the ERP system has been put in place to clear traffic foul up so that the chauffered ministers will get a quick and easy ride to their office ?

A lot of attention has been placed to upgrade trunk roads that certain Ministers will take in the morning to reach their offices.

Was it a co-incidence that it was during GCT tenure that there was an upsurge of road improvements along Bukit Timah and Dunearn Road, as GCT was staying at Nam Lee Avenue and will take this route to the Istana ?

Since the 1960s, the Thomson-Upper Thomson corridor has seen little work being done, with the bottle neck being at the convering point of Thomson-Braddell-Lornie-Upper Thomson Roads.

Forty years have passed, with the only three major works done - first to widen the roads into a dual 3-lane carriage way but with speed restricted at 70kmh; second the converging roads used to have two traffic circles that created chaos, which were changed into traffic controlled flows that were no better in regulating traffic from four off-setted directions; third a fly-over adjacent to Mount Alvernia Hospital that bring traffic from Upper Thomson towards Lornie Road and by-pass the Traffic Lights below.

After more then fifteen years, current works are in progress to build a fly-over connecting Braddel Road towards Lornie Road, with this fly-over forming a third level over the existing fly-over linking Upper Thomson Road to Lornie.

With all the high volume traffic converging into Lornie Road, the situation along this road has worsen, as every morning the traffic flow seems to slow down to a snail pace near the Singapore Island Country Club.

The LTA seems to be embarking on a fire-fighting approach in traffic planning, with no work done until the problem deteriorate, and when a solution is put in place - the matter has worsen to a point that the solution is no longer viable, as seen in the CTE situation.

ndmmxiaomayi SG

Wake up early to take trains. Laughing

I only can tell you that for NS line going towards Jurong East trains that are empty. In the evening, you can also catch them (towards Marina Bay), but they are hard to catch...

laurence82 SG

Sometimes i cant decide whether its a nationalised or privatised public transport.

Laughing

BillyBong SG

Would it be any surprise if the brilliant planners at LTA decide to place yet another gantry at this specific intersection along lornie road..?

By taking away all the accessible routes to the city and gating them with nothing more than giant cash registers, isn't this daylight robbery? What are drivers left with? Working from home?

Atobe SG

Originally posted by BillyBong:
Would it be any surprise at all that our LTA and transport ministry have NO CLUE as to how to manage an infrastructure that needs constant reinforcement?

After the MRT was built in the late 80s and early 90s, what new transportation system has the transport ministries come up with? Or did they choose to rest on their laurels and give themselves the typical 'pat on the back' for a supposed 'job well done'?

We have moved 16 years since then, and only in the last 3 years did ministry planners realise the need for a circle line to support the already clogged EW and NS lines of the MRT? Have they any respect for schedules? Judging by the numerous delays faced by circle line and the recent tunnel collapse, there does not appear to be a proper system in place to manage the nemerous contractors in place, leading to finger pointing and the 'blame game' being employed to get the public 'off their backs'.

Apart from lip service being afforded to the public, what real plans do they have to cater to a population of 6.5 million? Even as PM Lee annouces that his new budget will offset GST for the lower income group (another govt lip service without substantiated plans), there does not seem to be any hope of a roadmap to handle the congested needs of our transport system.

If the current Transport minister is anything like Yeo Cheow Tong and Mah Bow Tan, can we expect the same Hoo and Ha boo-boos as his predecessors?

With the Phase One of the Circle Line ending at the proposed Marymount Station, Phase Two works have begun to bring the Circle Line onwards towards the next stop at Thomson (not confirmed), Bukit Brown (near SICC Adam Road, not confirmed), Bukit Timah (Serene House) , Holland Village, Alexander Hospital, Portsdown Road (One-North), National University Hospital, Pasir Panjang, Telok Blangah, Harbor Front-Vivo City - and possibly back to Suntec City and towards Dhoby Ghaut to complete the Circle route.

Unfortunately, the convulted route that the Circle Line has taken with so many frequent stops, it will extend the time taken to reach one's destination; even though it provides a wider option to connect to the existing MRT lines without passing through the exchanges in the City center.

Marymount station will probably see some White Elephant cardboards being put up, as SMRT claim that the population density is insufficient to make this station economically viable.

Could the next confirmed stop at Bukit Timah Station be any more promising - being located in a District 11 setting, where there are no high density HDB blocks around, compared to the vast number of private housing and many HDB residences at Sin Ming Road and the fringe of Bishan Estate that are all within 3 kilometer radius from Marymount Station ?

The present Minister of Transport speaks with some LKY's accent and LHL hand movements, can anyone expect any original thinking from a person whose own personality can be so easily influenced ?

BillyBong SG

Do you really believe the bukit timah station will have any trouble with its official opening date? With Lim Swee Say and Vivian Balakrisnan the resident MPs, along with the need to cement the higher-income group's voting base, can a repeat of the Buangkok station white elephant incident surface?

There might be more than just 'white elephants' being posted along the roadside, given the larger resources available to these high-income group to pursue.

As for creating a problem with a solution in the case of the VERY PACKED circle line, one method is to create 'external' and 'internal' trains. With internal trains remaining permanently within the circle line to ferry passengers who wish to travel to a different station in the circle line, as opposed to external trains bringing in commuters from the NE, NS and EW lines, this should at least solve the immediate problem from arising.

Hopefully, SMRT already has a plan to tackle this crowd issue before it literally 'crowds' out their planning.

Fingolfin_Noldor SG

The only possible users of the Bukit Timah station would be the school students in the area and possibly the children of the rich fellas. In all truthfulness, the people in the area all own cars. They don't quite need public transportation.