SINGAPORE - The Land Transport Authority has received 10 bids for
the second Government bus tender, which closed at noon on
Friday.
Bids to run the Loyang package - 25 bus routes in the Punggol and
Pasir Ris area - were submitted by three local firms, four foreign
players and three joint ventures.
The three Singapore companies are SBS Transit, SMRT, and Woodland
Transport, while the foreign entities are Busways (Australia),
Keolis (France), RATP Dev Transdev (France), and Go-Ahead
(Britain).
The consortiums are: Travel GSH (Singapore) and Jiaoyun Group Corp
(China), Kok Tong Transport and Engineering Works (Singapore) and
Jinan Public Transportation Corp (China), and lastly, Tian San
Shipping (Singapore) and Kumho Construction and Engineering (South
Korea).
In the inaugural tender, 11 bids were received, with
Anglo-Australian group Tower Transit being awarded the deal in May
2015. Tower Transit had put in a bid of $556 million for the
five-year contract to operate the Bulim package, 26 routes in the
western part of the island.
The winning firm for this second package is expected to start
services from the second half of 2016 with about 400 buses. This
will grow to about 500 buses in 2021.
Twenty-two of the routes are currently run by SBS Transit, with
three new routes to be added.
Under the Government contracting model, buses and infrastructure
are owned by the Government while operator is in charge of running
the routes and meeting specified service standards.
ST
