Just something to share when I drove past Woodlands depot (along
Woodlands Industrial Park E4) last night, time range about 12
midnight to 1am, after I drove around the area to drop my
friend back to his home nearby.
Saw a long stretch of queue of buses (single deckers and bendy
bus) stretching from all the way from SMRTB side entrance along
Woodlands Industrial Park E4 all the way to almost the end of
Woodlands Industrial Park E5, waiting to return to depot and park
the buses inside. A few MANs (with hazard lights on) parked the
opposite lane along Woodlands Industrial Park E4, opposite
Woodlands depot.
Driving further down towards Admiralty Road West, saw a few more
single deckers (with hazard lights on) after Woodlands depot
stopping by the kerb and the BCs are outside either resting or
smoking. There was a SMRT personnel outside the entrance to direct
the buses into the depot.
Is the situation really that bad for SMRTB depots that there is
always parking crunch inside the depots and buses end up forming
long queues and start/stop bumper to bumper outside the depot until
every BCs spend hours wait for their turn to enter the depot
to park the buses? Are bendy buses really took up too much
space in depots that cause this parking crunch problem everyday? Or
is it the poor fleet management by SMRTB whoch do
not specifically allocate a designated slot for every bus to
prevent such delays and long queues of buses outside the depot?
Sometimes I really pitied the BCs who have to spend their times
for such delays to just park their buses back to their respective
depots whereby if there are enough parking slots in the depot
and shorter bus queues, they would have went home earlier and
have more time to rest.
Problem is the poor management and heck care attitude of SMRTB
all the while. It might be caused by bendy buses taking
up too much spaces, which resulted in parking crunch and allocation
problems. and these buses attributing long bus queues formed up
along roads, which cause such delays even in non operational hours.
And other problems highlighted by other forum mates in this
thread and other threads.
Main point is,
Is more resting time for BCs after work more important,
especially after driving for almost half a day everyday but still
have to deprive more hours just because of waiting to park their
bus back to depot?
And as highlighted by other forum mates, is the efficiency of
bus services and operations more important, as compared to
long queues formed by buses and detoriated by bendy buses
along bus lanes, bus interchanges and even bus depots, be it
operational hours or non operational hours? Is the
fleet management efficiency more important, as compared to
space crunch caused by bendy buses and high accident and burnt down
rates of bendy buses?
Go figure these questions above. Are these points above
more important than just for the sake of having bendy buses
for more varieties? Although I may attribute most of SMRTB
woes back to their poor management issues, but from the recent
debates on this topic as well from other forum mates, I would like
to question: are bendy buses also the cause of the downfall of
SMRTB in terms of better management and operations? Still viable in
the long run?
I have talked to a few SMRTB BCs before. And many of them do not
like driving bendy buses, citing reasons like hard and take longer
time to change lanes and overtake, have to take extra careful when
turning and reversing because of the lenght, especially reversing,
delays caused by these buses as they block their way to move out
of or into the berth and result in excessive honkings,
etc.
Just some thoughts to share here.
The parking crunch at the depot is very bad. From what an SL
told me, SMRT adjusted the timetables for the PM slot to start
later because of this.
Bendy buses can carry more people than DDs. They are longer BUT
the faster boarding and alighting offsets this, so I don't see why
SMRT should drop bendies totally.
