Singapore gets a taste of ‘commuting chaos’

Bloomberg

Singapore’s reputation for slick infrastructure and efficient public transport received a knock morning as two of its five mass transit rail lines suffered signaling failures, leaving thousands of disgruntled passengers late for work and unleashing a tirade of criticism on the
social media sites of the two rail operators.
“Lovely….I’ll send ye the bill for the cab I’m having to take to work,” wrote one commuter. “Hello #mrt where are you? forgot to get out of bed this morning?” riffed another.
Pictures of packed stations, queues for buses and stranded trains soon did the rounds in a city unused to
the kind of disruptions
that commuters in places
like New York and London face regularly.
Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit operators, SBS Transit Ltd., which runs the newest and driverless Downtown line, and SMRT Corp., operator of the oldest North-South line, both blamed faulty signaling for the delays.
The delays are symptomatic of a learning curve that many Asian cities are facing as they upgrade infrastructure to cope with swelling urban populations. In Singapore, where car ownership is discouraged with taxes that push the cost of a Ford Focus over $73,300, commuters are in the front line of the change to driverless rail networks.
The efficiency of the system led to overconfidence, said Lock Kai Sang, engineering professor at the Singapore Institute of Technology and a former member of an Independent Advisory Panel appointed by the Land Transport Authority to assess the rail system’s power supply.
While SMRT runs its lines, the rail network and stations were taken over by the government in 2016 to allow the operator to concentrate on improving service.