By Jeffrey Oon | Yahoo!
Newsroom – 1
hour 50 minutes ago
Clench your teeth and bear with it -- floods and MRT breakdowns
are here to stay.
While #SGFloods is so 2011, #MRTbreakdown is what’s in
now.
Wednesday morning’s breakdown on the Circle Line was the third MRT
disruption since last Friday and, by all accounts, it won’t be the
last.
I’ve lost count of how many have taken this place year alone. But
the real clincher for me was when SMRT started handing out chit
sheets on Wednesday for those who were going to be late for work or
school.
Wow, imagine that – a public transport operator with ready-made
“excuse me for being late” notes for its commuters. How
prepared.
And all this is taking place even as a high-level Committee of
Inquiry investigates the breakdowns of last December, as if those
were one-off incidents.
Whatever preventive measures that have been put in place by SMRT or
SBS Transit since the twin December disruptions are obviously not
working.
And if we’re going to have a COI report for every breakdown going
forward, well, those experts are going to be stuck in
committee hearings all year.
But you know what? I suspect that things will calm down soon.
Remember how there was widespread public outcry after the first
Orchard Road flood in June 2010 and other floods later that year?
What followed was plenty of finger-pointing between the URA, PUB
and the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources.
A succession of climate change and urban planning experts were
presented to the media and, in the end, what were we, the people,
left with?
A mish-mash of hazy explanations covering everything from
over-development in built-up areas, run-off due to the Marina Bay
reservoir, not “flooding but ponding”, to my favourite, “it’s
the change in weather patterns.”
And now? Everytime we look out the window and it’s pouring cats and
dogs, we mumble something about floods, check our Twitter feed and
take a photo or two, and carry on with life.
Seems to me like exactly the same thing is happening with these
train breakdowns.
LTA? SMRT? SBS Transit? Who’s going to care soon?
Between rail claws falling off, snapped power cables, “teething
problems” and “electrical earth fault” issues, even Transport
Minister Lui Tuck Yew was left to concede last week that
disruptions are now “unavoidable”.
So basically it’s a mess.
But in an almost laughable sort of way, we’ve begun to accept it as
part of Singapore life – just like the floods.
You know how used to make fun at our third world neighbours for
similar infrastructure problems?
Well, guess what, the joke’s now on us.
