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SBS, SMRT earn S$1 million in total for improving bus services

SINGAPORE — Public transport operators SMRT and SBS Transit (SBST) earned incentives of over S$1 million in total, for making bus service improvements under the Bus Service Reliability Framework (BSRF) trial being carried out to improve the regularity of bus arrivals.

SINGAPORE — Public transport operators SMRT and SBS Transit (SBST) earned incentives of over S$1 million in total, for making bus service improvements under the Bus Service Reliability Framework (BSRF) trial being carried out to improve the regularity of bus arrivals.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) said the trial – which rewards operators for improvements and penalises them if reliability worsens – has shown “encouraging results” with improvements, with 18 of the 22 services that are part of the exercise improving enough to earn incentives. 

Started in February last year and modelled on service quality standards applied in cities such as London, the framework gauges the regularity of a bus service using the concept of excess wait time (EWT), the average additional waiting time experienced by commuters. Operators earn payouts if they improve on the EWT or pay a penalty if the EWT worsens, which is measured in units of per 0.1 minutes. More services will be added to the trial in the second half of this year, with details to come at a later date. 

The 22 services selected by the LTA comprise high frequency feeder and trunk routes with “reliability issues”. Since the trial started, commuters on average have experienced more regular wait times and greater ease in boarding as the passenger load became spread more evenly across the various bus trips.

For the period of June and November last year — the first assessment period of the trial — SBS Transit earned S$710,285.71 for reliability improvements to 11 services, while SMRT earned S$345,714.29 for improvements to seven services. 

“There were no penalties deducted from both operators for this assessment period as none of their services had deteriorated more than 0.1 minutes to fall into the penalty zone,” the LTA said. “The incentives will help to offset the costs incurred by the PTOs to hire the additional service controllers to support the BSRF.”

The LTA today (April 9) also gave updates on the Bus Service Enhancement Programme (BSEP), under which 1,000 government-funded buses will be injected into the public bus network by 2017 to expand the fleet by some 35 per cent. 

From January to March, 40 new buses were rolled out, bringing the total number of BSEP buses rolled out to 590. Over the same period, the programme introduced the new SBS Transit service 122 and extended SBS Transit service 386, bringing the total number of new or amended services under programme to 38.

Twenty-one bus services saw 33 additional buses deployed during morning and evening peak hours during the three months. One such service was SBST service 359 which now runs at runs at seven-minute intervals during the morning peak period, down from nine to 10 minute in the past.

SIM University (UniSIM) transport analyst Park Byung Joon noted the improvements made by services under the BSRF trial but cautioned that the results came from a small sample. “When you are looking into a very small portion, then of course they can put extra care to improve the performance of these lines. When you expand this to the entire bus service, whether bus companies have the capability to do it, that’s something we have to see,” said Dr Park.

National University of Singapore transport expert Lee Der Horng said SBST and SMRT have to find ways to translate the improved reliability into customer experience. Customers do not measure waiting times at the level of seconds, he said, referring to the 0.1 minute unit used to determine how much incentives and penalties are incurred under the framework. 

“Passengers may not really feel the difference of one minute above or below the excess wait time,” said Prof Lee. “They are concerned whether the bus will come regularly, and frequently during the peak hours.” To improve commuters’ experience, a service with low EWT but also low frequency could be improved by having buses arrive in shorter intervals, he said.

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