I couldn’t find time to write lately, not because I am busy but rather due to my bad time management. Fortunately I didn’t manage my time so badly that I had to skip the “BBC Bloggers evening” (held at Pierside, One Fullerton) organised by Dunbar-Jones & Associates on April 19th. The primary objective of this event was of to introduce the Asia Business Index which BBC had put up. There were 9 others bloggers (such as Mr. Tan Kin Lian, Donaldson Tan from New Asia Republic and friend Darryl Kang) invited to meet with Jeremy Hillman and Francesca Unsworth of BBC in an exchange of insights and perspectives about Singapore and region.

The 9 other bloggers invited are definitely better known in blogosphere or social media where I am a nobody. I rarely get more than 500 hits a day and that only a good day after I get listed on Singapore Daily! Thus, I am actually surprised that I was even invited at all. I am greatly humbled after the free and cordial exchange of views with many of those present. Of course the bulk of the things discussed surround the upcoming General Elections since Parliament was dissolved that same day. A few of the bloggers present have given me many new perspectives of certain matters (such as certain opposition figures) and they made a big impact on some of my views. Some even gave me suggestions on how I can further improve my blog.

The views shared at the event inspired me to write this post even though I have yet to read up the manifesto or the election promises of various political parties. Fact is, I haven’t been actively catching up with the news lately – thousands of news articles in my RSS had remained unread. Even so, I noticed that the Workers’ Party [WP] is on the receiving end of bulk of the flak from the ruling party – in particular over the housing policy. In my opinion, the WP gave as good as it took, if not better. Combined with the shabby performance of cabinet ministers like Lim Swee Say on Mediacorp Channel 8, along with the fielding of new candidates like Tin Pei Ling and ex-Chief of Army Ah Beng Chan Chun Sing, much of the ruling party’s aura of invincibility has been diminished, if not shattered.

I will leave the matter of housing to a latter post since that is a more complicated issue, and also because I need to cool off as I personally considered the People’s Action Party [PAP] to have betrayed Singaporeans as far as the promise to provide affordable housing is concerned. I am sick of the lame excuses Mah Bow Tan is giving to justify a policy that enslaves the people and siphon off our money into a national reserves for the unaccountable investment purposes of the GIC and Temasek Holdings.

From what I have read, the WP has allegedly proposed to nationalise the public transport companies in their manifesto. Libertarians and free market supporters will definitely cry foul over the WP’s suggestion. However, I am not here to defend the merit (or the lack of) in WP’s proposal on public transport, though I certainly object to (if not reject) what Lim Hwee Hua said when she dismissed the idea. Let me paraphrase what the minister had said: “to nationalise public transport, it would be ‘a step backwards’ in the level of services commuters currently enjoy. Nationalisation of public transport in many other countries had led to inefficiency”

First of all, there is no direct competition between these so-called ‘private’ public transport companies. It is a known fact that any bus service that runs along MRT lines are removed and neither SBS Transit or SMRT has any bus services competing with each other directly along the same routes. We even read very often on the news that services are planned in such a way to ‘compliment’ one another. While all of these sounds good on paper, no one had considered that the impact of service disruption to the SMRT and the lack of alternative is in itself a form of inefficiency. For e.g. the recent East-West line breakdown for 2 hours about 2 week ago, and a possible attempted suicide last Friday near midnight at Sembawang MRT station has caused a major disruption to the lives of many people. Whenever something like this happened, commuters scrambled to catch taxis or find a bus service that would put them in the general direction of their destination – often at great loss of time and costs – because the transport planners considered it ‘inefficient’ to have ‘duplicating’ services.

The bus service itself isn’t any better. Anyone who has taken some of the bus services like SBS 2, SBS 32, SBS 51, TIBS 61, TIBS 67, SBS 154, SBS 174 or SBS 196 from end to end would wonder whether an inmate of the Institute of Mental Health [IMH] planned the roundabout route which can take one up to two hours to travel from end to end. If it puzzles anyone why I would be complaining about a 2-hour bus trip, that because that’s the same amount of time I took to travel from Hsinchu City to Taipei City when I was in Taiwan in 1993. My rough estimate is that Hsinchu to Taipei would be the equivalent from Singapore to Muar (or less). Now consider the fact that Singapore itself is probably not very much bigger than Greater Taipei. The only bright spot about these long bus rides is that at the end of the day, one might actually discover roads or streets in Singapore that he wouldn’t discover otherwise. Is Lim Hwee Hua telling us that this is actually *gasp* efficient?! I wouldn’t want to start ranting about taxis, since I have ranted enough about it before. (See: ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]})

Thus the truth is this: the local public transport companies have a de-facto monopoly and we certainly don’t have much choice nor say about it. With the MRT being the main mode of transport for the majority, the government wants us to believe that it is very well run and a superb world class transport system. Much has been reported about the international acclaim given to our public transport, but does it really matter when everyone you talked to feels otherwise? On the social media front, one only need to include the hashtag #smrtruinslives in Twitter to get a daily feel on how the very people who used it felt. I personal wondered whether a google search with the keywords “Singapore MRT sucks” might turn up even more horror stories.

Beside that, it is public knowledge that the largest shareholder of SMRT is Temasek Holdings (around 54 ~ 55%) while the Singapore Labour Foundation – a stat board under the Ministry of Manpower – is ComfortDelgro’s single largest shareholder (12.2% stake). That simply means, despite the facade of private-owned transport companies, it is actually some what state-owned. In short, we are thus provided a system that has the worst aspects of both nationalised and privatised public transport company. It is a state-owned monopoly where we can do shit about, combined with state-owned companies pretending to be private companies which primary objective is to create value for shareholders (i.e. be profitable). As such, the public transport companies can almost raise fares annually citing an increase in operating costs (rubber stamped by the so-called “Public Transport Council” [PTC]), without any tangible improvement in serivces they provide at all. It begs the question, would the WP’s offer be any worse or inefficient at all compared to what we are really having now? The WP’s proposal is certainly not something Lim Hwee Hua can dismiss with a few words or the wave of Harry Potter’s magic wand.

The fact that we have complained, ranted and whined over this so often in the past few years showed us that the PAP has failed in providing a solution. All the PAP is capable of, is raise fares – i.e. throw money out of our pockets – at the problem even when it has been ineffective. At most, such measures worked only for a few weeks before everything returns to ‘normalcy’. But before that, the main stream media would have overwhelmed us with glaring reports of the purported ‘effectiveness’ and ‘success’ of these harebrained measures.

I must say I have enough of this bullshit, and I am open to any ideas – even radical ones such as those of the WP – other than the ineffective PAP ones which not only failed to solved the problem, but had in fact worsen the situation by increasing the burden of our wallets.