So how do you then explain SBST's clear open challenge to SMRT's
impending CCL at Kent Ridge?
The deployment of Wrights and Citaro and K230UBs on 95/96/151
are definitely not coincidental.
And yes. It works.
While plenty of people at NUS welcome the CCL, they also note
that sticking to the buses might be good also. We shall see.
For myself, I'm sticking to buses. Kent Ridge station is too
inconvenient for me. In fact, Haw Par Villa station would be a
better choice if I ever choose to take CCL.
No. SMRT just comes across as bo chap where it should be. I'm
not the only one who feels that way. Its the general consensus
amongst many of the people I know as well. And all the recent bad
publicity is not helpful.
Although im not clear who u are replying to since you never
quote anyone and i did not mention anything about smrt improving
its bus or rail services at all (and its quite clear that they have
little or no interest to improve), but still...
There are always places trains cant cover, which is why buses
are needed. In the case of NUS, its not always feasible to walk
from the ccl stations to many of the schools as you have correctly
pointed out. Thats why 95 96 151 and the shuttles are still needed
to bring people around. I dont see it as competiting against the
ccl, but more of complementing it by increasing capacity of buses
between kent ridge station and schools, and thats a good thing for
commuters.
As for clear and direct competition between smrt and sbst, my
view is that it only happens when many commuters who originally
uses smrt trains to travel long distances now switches to take sbst
bus or rail services instead. In that case, then the big chunk of
fare would go into sbst's pockets.
And i fully agree on your point that smrt is not keen to improve
its services, at least for now. Their buses can never compete
directly with sbst, frequency is too sparse, and too little
services. But of course for smrt areas, then its not an issue since
theres not much competing services, so they dont really see why
they need to "snatch passengers" from the other company. Their
trains are basically a monopoly, and for most cases between mrt-mrt
stations, buses either take a longer time, or cost more (other than
TPE services and some other rare ones). Until dtl is completed, its
unlikely that they would improve since no one is there to snatch a
significant amount of pax away. So why would they need to improve
that?
My 2 cents.
