Saturday, December 24, 2011

Reduce over-reliance on MRT

We are now over-reliant on the MRT station. A breakdown of the train service, due to technical fault or terrorism, could cause chaos. Should we build up a complementary system, using buses, to reduce this over-reliance and build up the capacity that is badly needed during the next few years (before the new MRT lines are open)? How can this be done?

I suggest to allow express buses to operate between the bus interchanges. These buses do not stop to pick passengers along the road. They can use the bus lanes and travel quickly. There should be a local service using small buses and local taxis to bring people from their homes to these interchanges. Do you like this concept?

3 comments:

Jamesneo said...

This idea is good but the buses should be a hybrid kind whereby it can be run on electric/or natural gas and not only diesel as my view is that diesel will become too expensive over the next 5-10years

rex said...

rex comments as follows,

The idea is good and in order to make it econmically viable, the bus operator must charge prices lower than what smrt charge from point A to point B.

This is the true spirit of free competition.

Privatisation of SMRT is supposed to create healthy competition to benefit consumers. However in reality, SMRT and the LTA calls the shots and does not tolerate competition on parallel routes of SMRT. This creates a monopoly situation and a lot of problems we face today is because of monopoly where the owners get arrogant and irresponsible. In a monopoly the owner is king. The consumers have little choice and are entirely at their mercy.

rex

Tan Kin Lian said...

Hi, folks
Thanks for your comments.
It should be possible for LTA to licence individual bus operators to run the express bus services. It should be quite straight forward. The supply can be elastic, i.e. more individual operators will come forward when there is demand. It will be true competition at work.
The services will probably be more useful during the morning and evening peak hours and can take away from of the heavy traffic from the MRT trains.

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