Seriously, look at the number of buses idling inside depots,
SBST or SMRT, on a normal weekend. These buses could be put to
better use. In fact, not optimizing the use of SBST buses must have
been a non-commercial reason, because it's the logical thing to do
to charter the buses out.
Scheduled fleet on weekends are totally dependent on loading,
and actual statistics have shown that passenger count for a typical
feeder service is only 90% on Saturdays and 70% on Sundays compared
to working Weekdays. Deploying the same fleet count on weekends
mean drivers have less chance to be rostered for regular off-days,
certain maintenance is not possible & cost outlay is not
matched with expected revenue. We're not going to have open houses
every weekend!
In fact, putting these buses to good use (like increasing
capacity provision at RWS) on certain weekends allow better use of
these buses and opens up the possibility for certain drivers who
don't mind coming back to work for double pay.
At the end of all these, we need to ask ourselves, is there even
QoS for loading applicable on weekends?
Resource allocation is important but not to the expense of
compromising service standards. Bus companies should take the
initiative to monitor the service standards during weekends. Low
ridership on weekends for some routes doesn't mean that it applies
to other routes. And these routes came to their ownership for their
responsibilty to provide a good service standards to commuters,
regardless peak or non peak. If bus companies always need the rules
and regulations like Qos to determine their service operations
standards, then something is very wrong with their way of providing
quality service standards. And not all of their shuttle services
are on weekends, how about IKEA shuttle services, other than
using the PA buses?
As known, our buses are always overworked in our public bus
operations. In this case, shouldn't these buses be resting during
the weekends if necessary and scheduled for maintainance and
cleaning so as to reduce the chances of overworking/overheating and
breakdown rates when they are deployed for more prioritised and
demanding working hours during the weekdays?
SMRT is always contradicting with themselves. At first, their
bus services are having service standards lapse like poor
frequencies, dirty buses, etc and their excuse is that they
have not enough resources like buses and drivers. Then when it
comes to bus renewal, they don't want to purchase a few more new
buses to replace the older and badly maintained buses, which
already should have taken off from service, despite the company as
a whole making millions of profits year after year.
Rather they continue to limit new bus fleets and still
claiming their nonsense of limited resources, they can still go
into secondary shuttle bus services where their basic bus
operations are still having many service standards lapses. We
commuters pay for their services, and always have to give in to
their increasing fares. They bought in new buses, however, choose
to use some of them to provide secondary shuttle services, while
the public commuters are already hoping that they can replace the
older and badly maintained ones, which they still choose to keep
and extend their lifespan and continue using these poorly
mainitained buses. Moreover these new buses can improve the
frequencies for many of their services while some of the older
fleets can be scheduled for resting, cleaning and maintanance
instead.
Their existance is still providing public bus services. If they
are so keen on private shuttle services, then give up the
basic public bus services to other companies. Don't let commuters
pay more to suffer from poor services.
