Man, today I suddenly realised what a blessing it is to be a teacher, work at a place near my house, and being able to bike commute to work. I was on the road in Karen's car a few times today and to me the street conditions are really making the option of owning a car untenable to me even in the far future, what with the frequent traffic jams making the cars crawl in long lines at so many places. Can you imagine paying so much for a car to drive on these roads?
Travelling on public transport is an equally unpleasant option - SMRT must be deluded to dare report that their services are underutilised when people complain that buses don't come frequent enough; they probably just look at some ulu bus routes and not the few important services like 74, 133 etc. On these routes, many can expect to be packed standing upright for half an hour or more every morning. Like someone said in the papers, the bigshots of Singapore should use their services to serve as an example for the rest of the nation, if they really think it's good enough. And they still don't bother to put up route lines at every bus stops; how to give people confidence to transfer between services etc? Plus TVmobile irks me to no end.
So, imagine being tortured in the morning for more than an hour everyday and ending up in office half dead. I'm so glad I'll arrive at school invigorated everyday instead.
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2 comments:
It depends on the measure being used. Bus companies will feel that the bus is underutilised if the buses are not (for example) filled to 80% capacity, 80% of the time. The returns are below expectations for the cost of petrol, salary of bus driver, maintainance of bus etc.
Passengers are complaining because the buses come too infrequently. One looks at frequency, the other looks at volume.
Well... just my opinion... not that I think the bus frequency is all that great, just that from a business point of view, I don't think its wrong.
Good observation - perhaps then to fulfill customer needs, public transport need to look at their specific demands rather than do quantitative performance benchmarking that does not address specific concerns.
What people see: Bus 74 is crowded every morning and evening with school-going kids.
What SMRT might discover: Bus 74 service is underutilised (because the rest of the day there's not enough volume to fill the bus!)
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