In the end, the cycle goes back again. People would rather drive
their own private transport as they have to do more transfers, pay
more fares and have to squeeze more in the stupid overcrowding
trains.
Public transport is supposed to serve the public, not the agenda
for certain group of people. Guess the kind of selfish comment of
changing mindsets will, like said earlier, deter more from
taking public transport because of all these kind of dumb
ideas.
Agreed. A transfer-based public transport system is far from
desirable, especially when it ain't broken. Resources are not
necessarily better allocated. While paid journey mileage might
decrease with a mix-and-match route, time spent on waiting for
transfers will increase travelling time. Infrastructure will need
to be beefed up, like lots capacity at interchanges and terminals
and bigger bus stops at major transfer stops, especially in the
city area where land is prime.
Fleet requirement might also increase as a split-up route will
overlap for certain sectors, especially if both sectors have
comparable demand which reduces the efficiency of splitting the
services up. Better reliability may also not be possible if a
traffic slowdown occurs on the overlapped sector; instead we have
more buses from both split services stuck in the jam! A good
example is Service 143 between Jurong East and Toa Payoh, which
plies through places of high traffic flow such as Orchard Road,
Chinatown and HarbourFront vicinity.
Ironically, if the example of multiple routes to choose from
when transferring to an high volume sector is cited, it will
quickly be rationalised to "prevent duplication" while buses are
more packed along the sector. Commuters stand to lose, while
operators charging a higher fare under throughfare will not lose
out, since revenue should remain, loss of transfer penalty must be
recovered.
It just seemed that in the desire to maintain QoS standards for
basic services, we have overcapacity issues on certain routes
(fleet additions on services which already do not have capacity
issues and will not be adversely affected by a delay of a minute or
two in waiting time by increasing headway to 11 or 12 minutes)
while desirable routes like inter-town, radial and express routes
are not favoured when put against circuitous routes which should be
relegated to feeder services as defined by a hub-and-spoke
system.
It felt like the whole exercise is a change for the sake of
changing, transfer for the sake of transferring, because they have
to be seen as doing "something" when travel trends in the public
transport system has more or less stabilised.
