World Class Transport System

As I was packing my messy room, I stumbled upon some of my primary school artwork and it brought back memories of the time when our teacher had asked us to draw a theme about the future. At that time, the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) was about to be introduced in Singapore and many of my classmates had drawn their artistic impressions of the MRT train. It was a big thing then; something new, something exciting and something futuristic.

Now as I stand amidst the crowd in the busy MRT train and see their indifferent faces, it is apparent that the hype from years ago had died away. In fact I could even see several frustrated and disgruntled faces from having to squeeze with the crowd. And it seems every time the term "world class transport system" is mentioned, there will be many voices of dissatisfaction of the transport service here in Singapore.

A colleague had recently told me how it seems that the frequency of buses and trains was getting too slow to cope with the increasing crowd, and how over the years her transport time from point A to point B seemed to have increased. Indeed as our nation's population expands, so does the demand for an efficient transport system.

The solution devised by the transport operators in Singapore was to reduce the seating capacity to increase the standing space, thus increasing overall capacity. Yet if we look at the demographics of Singapore, we are beginning to have a wide aging population and many of these old folks require the seats. By reducing the seating capacity, it is not uncommon to see many seat-needy people like old folks and pregnant women standing uncomfortably in trains and buses especially during peak periods.

There was once a campaign asking the public to give up their seats to those who need it more and in fact there are designated seats in the trains and buses specifically for these people, indicated by decals at the seats. Yet many times I've been in situations where most of the passengers on board are genuinely in need of seats but there just isn't enough seats to go around. That's not including those who has had a hard day's of work and struggling to stand just to get back home for a well deserved rest.

My colleague was speculating that one of the reasons why many fundamental problems exist in our transport system today could be possibly due to that the top people making the critical decisions on our public transport, are not regular passengers themselves and are more likely to be car owners. If that is the case, then perhaps in our pursuit of having a world class transport system in Singapore, we need to have a team who truly believe in building an efficient public transport where most of the population can commute in ease and comfort; a team who uses the public transport themselves.