You are wrong. Its whether the companies choose to or not,
likely due to finacial reasons. Take a look at Citybus and New
World First Bus in HK, they don't have that many depots too and
numerous buses end up parking by the roadsides and bus terminals.
Despite that, they remain well maintained. Their depot facilities
are also not as state of the art as Singapore's. In view of this,
any talk of 'maintenance capacity' is nonsense.
It is all about the mentality of operators and their employees.
If they take pride in providing a service to customers, it will
show in their service (eg appearance and technica well-being of
vehicles). The solution is not LTA taking action but an improvement
in mentality.
Except that, NWS (Citybus and NWFB) with a fleet size similar
(just slightly larger than SMRT), has at least 4 depots with major
maintenance facilities and some smaller ones with 2 or 3 bay
maintenance areas. SMRT only has 3 maintenance depots.
Yes, financial reasons is part of the reason, that is if you
hold the concept of money talks, ie "with money you can do
anything". In HK, bus companies can cover their costs by having
different fares for different routes (further price disrcimination
to extract more consumer surplus - basic economics). In Singapore,
the government controls the fares for most routes using just mainly
2 sets of fares, trunk and express, not enough price discrimination
to allow bus companies to extract the corresponding consumer
surplus. Without that kind of money; the companies have not been
making any profits over the past few years; where do you want to
build more depots or expand your maintenance areas.
Then came GCM, yes the bus companies may be able to earn more
revenue and finally make a profit under the GCM, but it also means
that ever since the move to GCM has been announced some years ago,
the incumbent bus companies have lost a guranteed operating
environment which they used to have. They therefore have little
incentive to expand their maintenance areas as the depots would
likely to be taken back by the government sooner or later. And this
coincides with the increase in amount of buses due to BSEP with the
same amount of maintenance areas. So until GCM finally kicks in
with more depots being built, I don't expect anything to change.
Therefore the ball is in LTA's court right now.