The case for bus reorganization (again)
Tags: Singapore, Public Transit

It will unfortunately have to involve a lot of cuts.

Pardon me for branching off into other transit topics again, but not much has been happening in the world of trains recently. The typical bus service in Singapore is much longer, and as I’ve mentioned before we still have several bus services that have not seen significant changes in the past 50 years since they were introduced in the 1971 service reorganization.

I’ve also spoken before on flat fares, but in order to operate a flat fare system in a sustainable manner, though, we’ll need ol’ Beeching and his axe. In a sense, flat fares already exist on feeder services, where the distance travelled is capped at the lowest possible fare band — that is, 3.2km. But can they be expanded more across the network?

Furthermore, breaking routes into shorter parts could be a way around long charging times and low battery capacity of electric buses — with a shorter route to run, electric buses would not need to spend so long recharging in one sitting, which may still work in our favor if we choose to pursue fast-charging vehicles.

Roaring seventies

1971 was a very different time. Let alone the MRT system, SBS did not even exist at that time. In 1971 there were many different operators with competitive pressure to work against each other. If this reminds you of something, put that aside first, my tale’s not done.

Shortly after the reorganization, one of the four surviving companies — the Singapore Traction Company, filed for receivership in late December 1971. Its routes and fleet were split up amongst the three other companies in hopes of improving their services as well. Alas, that was not to be. In 1973, with government involvement, these companies were again merged into the Singapore Bus Service — today’s SBS Transit.

There was of course a certain degree of cuts following the merger to eliminate routes that competed with each other — necessary in a multi-player world, not in a monopoly — but otherwise it’s fair to say that between the 1970s and the opening of the MRT system in the late 1980s, the bus system as it was did not see any significant modifications. Even when TIBS entered the market, whole districts were handed wholesale to TIBS to avoid creating overcompetition, not unlike the packages of today’s Bus Contracting Model.

Yes, with the Initial System and the NEL we did see a certain amount of rationalization, but presumably given their increasing political unpopularity in light of a perceived dip in MRT reliability (and remaining PTSD), rationalizations haven’t been happening much lately. I don’t think that’s the best mindset for the longevity of transit sustainability in general, especially factoring in the increasing competitiveness of semi-private transport options and active mobility such as bike-sharing.

Bull in a china shop

Yes, I meant it. Bus service rationalizations *are* a necessary evil in this day and age especially as more passengers switch to MRT for long distance journeys (by their own choice, maybe the remainder forced), and buses are reduced to a form of second last mile transportation from the MRT station to where people want to go, where they can also compete with active mobility options. I personally don’t mind walking more than 400m to a train station, since my walking pace is quite fast and for an office worker like me it can be one of the few opportunities to exercise in a day. But I am an outlier, and there are plenty of use cases of short-distance bus rides where stops can be counted on one hand.

A reader thinks something is very, very wrong.

The key argument for short routes is reliability — with a shorter route, there is less possibility of a vehicle being caught up in jams or other traffic obstructions. One side effect of long routes and thus higher chances of trouble, especially during peak hours, is that it forces schedulers to err a bit too much on the safe side, which thus means slower journeys because there’s too much time allotted to travel from one stop to another. In a sense, this has the potential to result in waste even if the pressures placed by contracting models exerts pressure against it.

Furthermore, it’s also quite clear by modern planning paradigms that the rail system should form the backbone of longer-distance trips — in other words, having a direct bus to the office should not be the norm, but rather, an exception. Broken bus routes encouraging the use of the rail network can also have the benefit of increasing the efficiency of the overall transport network.

While from a passenger demand perspective there can simply just be short-trip variants of a route to fill in the gaps of a parent service, these can never be as flexible as increasing the frequency of a properly broken half of a route. If what a route needs is a bus every 8 minutes, running the main route every 10 minutes and a short-trip variant every 10 minutes between two departures of the main route — resulting in a combined 5 minute frequency on the shared section which can be too much especially once you think about persons being transported every hour.

Of course, it would be nice if we could send a smaller vehicle and achieve the same capacity goals with better frequency, but we can barely spare the manpower for a 12m city bus today; what makes you think a minibus would fare any better? That it is BYD themselves, and not the LTA or SMRT, owning the minibuses run on 825, probably speaks volumes to the potential longevity of that route, being the only remaining minibus route in Singapore after SBST got rid of their Dennis Darts. Aside from the TEL Lentor station at the doorstep of Lentor Estate, opening in a few months, that is.

Win some, lose some

Breaking routes also allows for a flat-fare system to be operated in a more sustainable manner, as the newly introduced routes can expect higher load factors if their terminating points are creatively designed and demand clearly moderated. At the end of the day, flat-fare earnings from a cut route may potentially be able to better the average fare collected from the previous incarnation where it was part of a longer route.

The main benefit of flat fares would be to vastly simplify the fare enforcement system, and thus reduce the need to tap a card to only at the boarding point. This has benefits such as allowing passengers to board from all doors (alighting passengers get off first, then queue up to board with all 4 readers available), which can reduce the time that buses spend at a given bus stop. If it works out, that can in turn allow schedulers to reduce the amount of time needed to stop at a bus stop as well.

There are, however, downsides. Firstly, not knowing when a passenger alights forces a rethink of some of our passenger management systems — the things that bring to you bus crowding measurements, for example. Planners may also lose the origin-destination matrix pairs that are currently visible and thus an insight on how traffic patterns work, forcing approximations based on things such as vehicle weight, for example.

The whole concept of distance fares also obviously goes out the window with a flat-fare system. Taipei have an interesting solution where their fare zones are at such a high level (every 8.5km on average) that most short-distance trips fall within a single zone, and thus a de facto flat fare can be charged for most riders. In London, the typical trip is short enough anyway that a flat-fare system can just work out, but of course with flat fares for long enough, their network design paradigms could have diverged from us very significantly in the past decade.

The part where we cut things

Of course, this is the interesting bit. You could even sort of do this yourself if you wanted to, given how bus service ridership data can be easily obtained from LTA Datamall. Even at a macro, anonymized level, it can still be quite useful to us. From the information in Datamall, I believe it should be possible to then obtain the average length of a bus trip, and then see just how much benefit breaking long routes can bring.

In 2015 Govtech staff did a writeup analyzing what they called “fingerprints” of a bus route. They identified certain “blocks” of routes near train stations and interchanges which they even say can be used as the starting point to break long routes into smaller parts. I’d go further and say that if we’re going to split things up, the information can also be useful as well.

A possible candidate would in fact be 66, since that’s the cover of this article. 66 operates two short trips, with only some departures on Fridays and weekends — 66A from Bedok only to Little India, 66B likewise but from Jurong East. Perhaps this could allow a split of 66 into two parts, with both halves looping at Little India or maybe extended to other more conveniently located terminating points.

Of course, if one really wants to go the full hog of flat fares and have even shorter bus routes, the broken routes could be further shaved back to only between Jurong East and Beauty World and a feeder service within Bedok, with the expectation to use the Downtown Line in between.

Bus-train integration, at Pie-IX station in Montreal (source: RMTransit on youtube)

With lesser routes (albeit more frequent) passing through a given area, perhaps the new MRT signage system could even be updated to announce bus transfers within the station itself. So instead of providing a code that one must then plug into a bus timing app to see what stops there, a simple “go this way, for this service” can be implemented instead.

There is a lot of potential here, but I think a lot of it will have to depend on whether we’re ready to do a hard reboot of the system like it’s 1971 again, especially in light of our investments into the MRT system in the coming decade as well as new bus technologies. Split routes could even create the possibility to slot in something even bigger on a given section, like trams.