The news that the SMRT won the ‘Best Passenger Experience’ award came to my attention when I saw Ridzuan’s twitter. I subsequently followed the link on his ‘Twit’ and read this post.

Below please see the news reproduced from CNA.

This is almost certainly funny, and like Sicarii said, ‘If this had come out on 1 April, I’d have brushed it off as an April Fool’s joke.’ .

However, when these – value for money, efficiency and reliability, as well as cleanliness and security – are used as key performance indicators (KPIs), then indeed our MRT is damned kriffing World Class Worse Class, even though I wonder how it did beat Hong Kong in terms of efficiency. Above which, as far as reliability is concerned, the recent 7-hour disruption of service affects only people living in the East, and it isn’t in itself a system wide failure.

But what is missing in the KPI is of course, customer feedback. And I doubt any such awards would want to take that into consideration because every city will have their gripes about their subway system. I personally don’t want to go into that again, since I rave and rant about it only recently.

Anyway, I had a really good laugh from this though poor Ridzuan’s views on Twitter were not very well received in some quarters. But of course his detractors are entitled to be happy with the best they can get from among the bad just as much as we wished for the better.

However, please stop telling us that you felt it is good enough for you – because I really don’t give a flying fxxk if you think shit is good enough for you as food too. You are always entitled to eat that! On top of that, we may perhaps be frogs in the well who should get out more often because we haven’t seen nothing yet, but you are not the one feeling how I feel, though I would be happy if you can invent a device so I can channel them to you such that I won’t feel anything.

In fact, I am really not sure what you have to lose to allow us to ask for a better subway service – such as a higher train frequency – since won’t you benefit from that as well?

Perhaps the only thing you got to lose is paying more for it. And in my opinion, the fares goes up annually anyway so you might as well ask for something!

This post is modified from a comment I posted on one of Ignorant Soup’s blog post.

He is dead right on this matter. People buy a car for 2 simple reasons – the public transport sucks and they really needed one (people who do sales for e.g.). In fact, I suspect Uzyn, the founder of ping.sg, would be in a better position to tell us why he bought a car too!

Here are some examplesof the gripes about our world class transport:

In short, this gahmen is talking out of its arse when it talks about a world class system without considering just how this blasted system that meets the generic performance matrix is in complete shambles when you include it’s true performance and daily commuter comfort for those travelling to work. In fact, I am not surprise that it takes most Singaporeans – without the luxury of moving like our Fallen Talents – about 45mins to an hour traveling between home and work. And that’s just only one way.

Please, don’t tell me to find a job that’s near home because jobs I don’t take are taken up by Foreign Fallen Talents in a blink and with much lower wages too!

Finally, it doesn’t take much for one to ask just how ‘World Worse Class‘ it is when the very guys who said so won’t even set an example to use it daily! How justified can the fare hikes really be, when the people who approves them generally only take public transports once in awhile? And I don’t even want to get started about taxis all over again, since I have talked about them before.