Can it happen here?

We have been fortunate, but we have to keep our guard up.

I watched the following video on the proposals for the Sepulveda Line in LA with equal parts horror and equal parts morbid fascination. That might be an understatement.

In short, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. People who don’t necessarily know what they’re doing, but with the necessary PR chops, can ruin the overall integration of a public transport system. At least we don’t have some bumpy history with many small private players later swallowed up by a single conglomerate before being split up again or something.

I’ll begin with saying that shortsighted decisions made in the past is mostly because of the powers that be digging their own graves. They did not fall for fancy numbers presented by PPP prospective bidders, like as presented in the video on the Sepulveda Line.

What are those mistakes they have made, we can argue all the way till the cows come home, but that would be unproductive and doesn’t leave us the time to discuss what should be provided in the current day. And no, while we can take all the effort that we can, every system can have its bad days, before you ask. And every system is as foolproof as the dumbest idiot given some form of control over it, such as when somebody in Malaysia didn’t realize he was driving a train in the wrong direction.

What matters is that we learn from our mistakes and be able to tell apart a good project from a bad project. They may not think out loud and tell us everything they’re doing, but on our own side we can start by engaging in good faith about the fundamentals.

The large amounts of central planning here, and the ability of the LTA to know what a stupid transport proposal is and thumb its nose at it, does not mean we do not need to be on alert for such attempts being made here. They have made mistakes. For example, there’s the LRT, which are essentially operated as guided busways with no driver due to the speed and stop separation, and not much of consideration put to how the grade separation of such systems can be put to use to achieve better transit outcomes such as increased capacity through longer trains.

After all, a single people mover vehicle carries as much as a bus. What it might have on its side, compared to actual busways, is being driverless, and the ability to run far higher frequencies at some semblance of reliability, than any bus service reasonably can because of traffic junctions. Are these features being used properly? I’d leave it to the reader to decide, but with the reminder that if we’re going to invest in certain capabilities, we might as well make the most out of it.

At the very least the lesson has been learnt by the LTA, and it appears that anything that will be built from now on is high capacity heavy rail; for which they buy the various key subsystems separately and put together the railway by themselves. To our planners there appears to still remain no concept of anything between a bus route and a train line — unless of course, the answer is to build 1–2 car mini metros like in the Seoul or Taipei metropolitan areas.

The second lesson of the video is that small things matter. Things like transfer penalties or being aware of upcoming developments (such as the moving of a BRT stop). It’s why you always see me calling back to the URA Master Plan, since the Master Plan will generally tell us what will be built and where.

The Cross Island Line is very similar to the Sepulveda Line as described, providing direct routes through natural no-mans-land between several areas. But over here, the population densities of the areas served by the CRL, are possibly several times greater than that of the Sepulveda Line. What does that mean? Capacity should be, at the least, double, since we’re starting from 6-car trains and working up to 8. If that’s excess capacity, then that’s how system reliability works, by being able to absorb passengers from other lines.

It’s not going to be perfect. Travel time estimates do not look great, nor do they appear to make the most potential out of the line. Interchanges are going to be quite deep, far, or a combination of both, and thus present relatively high transfer penalties which reduces the utility of the line. Good transfer design may be even more important here than in America, considering the ageing population. This means we need to keep walking distances low and/or provide movement aids such as moving walkways for the benefit of this demographic.

Though some schools of thought, predominantly in Asia, may think of this as a good thing, as the longer transfer passageways are more capable of absorbing rush hour passenger crowds, than shorter ones or cross-platform interchanges.

There’s really not a lot of easy ways out of this looking at how many current and potential CRL interchanges have an overground component. Only Hougang, Bright Hill and any potential DTL interchange will be completely underground. Even so, all these are CD Shelters which are difficult to touch. And only Bright Hill stations might be ready to accept the CRL without significant modification, since a walk around the station indicates that it was already planned with a future line in mind — still not perfect looking at how far away the CRL station may be from the TEL.

But it could have been way worse, such as placing transit stations in the middle of expressways. Even at Serangoon North, which could be very uncharitably described as in the middle of an “expressway” due to the layout of the local road network, an effort has been made to place the station exits as near to residential estates as possible and retain connections through the construction of underpasses. The same problem might haunt JRL Bukit Batok West station in the initial years, since most of its Jurong East catchment is across an expressway and it may turn out faster for them to simply take a feeder to Jurong East.

And if we want public participation, then we ourselves have to learn these lessons too — such as how nandert points out that BYD’s fancy numbers are actually trash because people don’t read the terms and conditions, necessary to make a fair comparison with the Bechtel proposal or whatever LA Metro proposes by itself. At least Angelenos know it’s bullshit. Do we?

Opposing projects you find stupid is fine. I fully expect such arguments to be used against me and tram advocates. But proposing an even stupider replacement (battery trains on high speed rail? Really?) takes the cake. The good part is that the LA Times reporter at least appears to have no conflict of interest, is just plain dumb, and hopefully people who know better don’t care. If there were conflicts of interest, it would be deeply troubling.

You can argue the same for long tram lines where a subway should have been built, or why the many BRT to tram conversions due to undercapacity are even happening across the world instead of straight out picking the higher capacity option first. Or using on-demand podcars in high capacity situations — and I say this knowing that I am likely to offend future employers, who are active in the field.

Woe betide us if we were to follow suit. But the LTA tends to act as if it has more money than sense and wants far too many layers of fallback, so what’s new? Looking at all the discourse around rail reliability, it could well decide to plan a network, based on public pressure from such quarters, for the 0.1% of the time the MRT is unavailable.

(I’ve already increased that, since SMRT claims it has a train service availability rate of 99.98% — that is, only one disruption lasting two hours or less in an entire year. Is that the case? Up to you to decide)

That said, why is this discussion important? In short, PPP may be a possible way out of the construction rut we find ourselves in. The LTA can simply release the business case for a given route, general station locations, and forecasted passenger ridership, let the private sector individually propose what they want to do to meet this challenge. The private sector can then wholly take over the construction and systems works, perhaps even get a concession to operate the project.

After all, an early proposal for a monorail in the Marina Bay area appears to have followed the current routing of CCL Stage 1, and instead of turning towards the National Stadium, CCL would have continued down to Tanjong Katong under the 2001 Concept Plan. This early proposal between Dhoby Ghaut and Tanjong Katong could have been built reasonably, but in that parallel universe maybe it would have been impossible to have the Circle Line.

Or the new one… but that’s not going to work either, because of TEL Stage 3. To be fair, it was proposed before the TEL stations were put out. But 10 years later, with no sign of development starting in the area, it might not be a good idea. Apart from the capacity issues clearly on display at Sentosa, there would be transfer penalties imposed on transferring from underground MRT stations to an elevated monorail. TEL stations may be deep, but at least there’s a direct train to Orchard. Furthermore, for the monorail, it’s not clear where a depot would go, and good luck siting one in such a dense area.

A further argument for PPP is that at least in theory, should the private sector contractor(s) also hold the operating concession and make money from it, they have a vested interest in getting the line open earlier — the earlier it opens, the more money they can make for a given contract duration. But if this logic applied to condos and malls, the construction industry wouldn’t be in such a rut, since property owners would have already put pressure on the industry to adopt more productive methods so they can get their developments up faster instead of vacuuming up cheap migrant labour.

I think PPP can succeed in Singapore, and part of the reasons for the failure of the examples I’ve quoted is because the authorities had other ideas. If they shared information with potential PPP bidders, the concept of making it someone else’s problem is sound. But its use is only limited, and it opens us up to a larger risk of being stuck with bad transit we then need to either remove or rehabilitate. And we should know better especially with past experience.

I think most importantly, we have to manage our expectations with whatever we get out of our investment. We should use the right tools to achieve the outcomes we want — if a bus is best for the route, use a bus; if rail is best, use rail; if walking and cycling are best, then create urban design where doing that is possible. And if autonomous vehicles work out best for a given system design; then autonomous vehicles it can be.

More often than not, we might find that solutions to our transportation problems are a mixture of the above, in varying quantities depending on the local situation.

And if you’ve come all the way to the bottom and still don’t know what a gadgetbahn is, do watch this RMTransit video:

Related posts:

Welcome to my weekly letter, where I share a few noteworthy articles and my own commentary. Without further ado…. “Week of November 08” is published by Enrique Tang in hetalink.

I track trends; I monitor numbers; I love stats. And I encourage every writer to do the same. But I also know the numbers don’t tell the complete story. Bounce rates, traffic sources, social shares…

On the journey to connect with your creativity and follow your soul path, dreams provide insights and symbols for contemplation. Once you have started recalling and recording your dreams, using dream…