Singapore—The good news is that Singapore’s train system is running very well indeed, hitting a benchmark that measures rail reliability from January through September this year.
Our MRT’s MKBF, or mean kilometer between failure, reached the one million train-km mark for the first nine months of 2020, in contrast to less than a decade ago, when disruptions and delays occurred every 58,000 train-km, according to The Straits Times (ST).
So, yes, this is something to rejoice over.
Now perhaps some attention may be given to solving problems inside the stations.
A netizen uploaded a video on the Facebook page All Singapore Stuff captioned “’Raining’ and ‘ponding’ at Jurong East MRT station” shortly after noon on Thursday, November 28.
https://www.facebook.com/allsgstuff/videos/514174055851783/
While some netizens called it a “Poor copy of Changi’s Jewel” and others quipped that “Soon they ll (sic) have watersports there,” a commenter pointed out how dangerous this must be. “Isn’t this rather dangerous to the staff and people….water is a conductor of electricity….what if there is a leak from one of the cables????”
Over at the Yishun MRT station, there was a large “human jam” for the second time in the past few weeks, as commuters got stuck on the one working escalator on Tuesday, November 26.
At 7:00 in the morning, at the height of the morning rush to get to work or school, only one of the four escalators was working.
The others were undergoing maintenance.
Netizen @RichardJang tweeted shortly after half-past seven, “Uprising escalator had broke down again at Yishun MRT. Crowd control measure to limit the travellers’ entrance is activated. It is left with one escalator as another escalator is under preventive maintenance with no work done. Maybe waiting for spare parts or engineers.”
Others also took to social media to express their frustration: @Renceheng tweeted at SMRT, “Why do you need to maintain two out of three escalators at Yishun MRT station at the same time????” @Renceheng tweeting at operator SMRT. “Have you seen the amount of insane congestion that you’ve created at the gantry area?!?!”
A video uploaded to All Singapore Stuff’s Twitter account showed crowds of people waiting to ride the escalator, with the caption, “Major human jam at Yishun MRT again. 2nd time in less than a month liao!#Singapore #SMRT #Yishun #WeKeepYourWorldStalling
Major human jam at Yishun MRT again. 2nd time in less than a month liao!#Singapore #SMRT #Yishun #WeKeepYourWorldStalling pic.twitter.com/8qosR4pVJK
— All Singapore Stuff (@allsgstuff) November 26, 2019
Just a little over a week before this, on October 18, escalators that were not working had also caused heavy human congestion.
Coconuts Singapore reports that SMRT is currently carrying out a project to refurbish the escalators in its stations, the first time it has done so in over 30 years.
The escalators’ manufacturer, Otis, is refurbishing 233 escalators in all, beginning from 2016. As of May of this year, 54 have finished refurbishment.
In May the SMRT wrote “Progress was slow in the first year of the project as Otis had to develop a customized refurbishment plan … Some refurbishment works may take longer than four months because additional issues are discovered only after the escalators are completely dismantled.” -/TISG
Read related: Khaw Boon Wan on rail sector issues: Our common customer is the Singapore commuter