Quite honestly, having studied SMRT's routing, I think it is not
surprising that they are bochap about their buses.
Feeder services are notorious for been low on fuel efficiency.
Look at the ratio of feeder against trunk for SMRT, and compare to
SBST. 40% of routes from SMRT are feeder. Cost of operation will
surely be adversely affected.
SMRT buses in general also run significantly higher mileages
than SBST ones, probably because of the depot locations in relation
to where the trunk services run. Cost of operation lagi jialat.
Worse.
Look at the buses they have purchased. Lagi cham. Expensive
buses with significantly higher running costs.
And now? Want to turn SMRTB around? Hard la.
But please la, no more bendies.
Stop making the situation worse.
I think it is VERY clear that LTA is unhappy with bendies.
It is very very clear already when it was announced that
subsequent depots to be built by govt. Quite unlikely bendy
provisions will be encouraged at least.
SMRT is already threatening to pull out of bus operations when
their license is up at 2016. I dont think that is unlikely given
SMRT's current situation.
One of the main problems of SMRT is also the lack of high
capacity buses. During peak hours, it has to deploy many more buses
because it does not have DDs. The reason it is not buying too many
bendies is of course the operation cost.
SMRT has some of the most crowded towns in Singapore -
Woodlands, Yishun, CCK, Bukit Batok - but it has hardly been able
to provide quality services to people. If you see the buses, they
are super crowded yet SMRT is bleeding losses. Why? Because loading
is mostly uni-directional and the other way round buses are
empty.
SMRT should have long back got DDs seeing SBST's success for sv
106, 178, 187, 188, 189, 190, 851, 854, 856, 857, 859, 962, 963,
964, 969 at least instead of just going on adding buses. This would
have definitely increased their profitability. Better that SBST
takes over all the SMRT services as well.
