What’s happening now is harrowing.
Left unchecked, it could potentially lead to a catastrophic disabling of the public transportation system in Singapore. In fact, signs of these are already somewhat showing in the most badly-hit areas of the bus system (which, extremely unfortunately, happen to be the exact same area I praised barely a few months ago for its excellent service frequency. How sad.)
As a somewhat aside before I dive into the entire COVID cluster-bus service disruption mania that broke out (I wouldn’t say unexpected, given how bus drivers practically everywhere around the world save China are falling to the virus like houses of cards… ), I do wonder sometimes, if such extreme circumstances like these would finally make them bus-haters realise the importance of buses in the entire network as a whole.
Probably after our bus system recovers from the shock of losing hundreds of available bus drivers will paragraphs like these go away, out from the sight of public discourse. Arguments like these, at best, stand as firm as flex tape fixes. In the case below, my response would be simple: It’s extremely well-known (to the point of infamity) that LTA does regular and sometimes irrational bus rationalisations (i.e. cutting service), and has done so over and over again over the years! For a bus service to stay alive after so many rounds especially if it runs somewhat parallel to a rail line (in this case 58), means that there is indeed justified demand for it therefore not warranting a service cut! So for you to advocate screwing long-distance buses as a whole over (just because one bus driver had a bad day and made a mistake) even when LTA doesn’t advocate such extreme measures, isn’t that quite like trumping up charges that can’t be substantiated well with logic? Like, if long trunk buses have a sizeable market, and a stable demand base, why force them to contribute further to overcrowding on trains? Why not invest in further improving them so we can actually help reduce train loads, given how network expansion on our MRT system is going practically nowhere?
Anyway, on to the main topic of today… on COVID clusters in bus interchanges yadada yadada…
In Chinese they have a saying 不看不知道，一看吓一跳, which perfectly sums up what happened when I randomly opened a news portal having gone off the matrix for quite a few days. Initially I thought this was merely another “small” cluster of bus-driver-related COVID cases centered around a single bus interchange, all isolated, and all was well. Just a repeat of the (now that we look back on it,) mild Bukit Panjang COVID cluster involving a handful of SMRT Buses staff. You know, just a couple of guys at Bishan and Sengkang catching the virus, getting isolated, and then coming back to work in four weeks’ time, with adequate replacements for their roles while they were on leave.
My, my, when I finally did look at the statistics, they weren’t just a “handful” anymore – I think my surprise can only be conveyed through pasting the exact same infographic I got to take a peek at. The one I first viewed can be seen at the top of this article.
70 cases.
Truly a monstrous and massive number of afflicted bus drivers to be found at just one single bus interchange! What’s more, it ain’t any typical bus interchange one would expect — barely 5 months earlier I praised Toa Payoh as the town with the best bus service i.e. most frequent buses! And this does not make the 20- or so cases each at other bus interchanges any less frightening — imagine what that does to the bus schedules! *shocked pikachu face*
As of the timing writing this piece commenced, 2 September 2021, the number of cases (at just Toa Payoh alone) has risen yet again to almost reach a hundred (I think when I wake up the following morning this figure will reach three digits, fingers crossed that that actually doesn’t happen ~amc)
And now 93 cases at Toa Payoh is being joined by 66 more at Boon Lay, or in short: shit’s getting serious!
It isn’t just the bus drivers and the bus operators feeling the crunch (certainly they are, especially those at Braddell and Ang Mo Kio depots with more than a hundred men down collectively). Passengers are feeling the heat caused by manpower shortages too. Already, bus services launching out of Toa Payoh (I haven’t checked for Boon Lay, but if the former is any indicator, this should also be the case) have seen frequencies collapse across the board, with reports appearing of one-hour waits at worst, and half-hour waits when slightly better, on certain bus services (especially 157 which connects the two most-affected bus interchanges). Quite literally what was thought couldn’t happen to buses (i.e. widespread overcrowding, something we thought was MRT-specific phenomena) overnight became a bitter reality, and this caught many of us by surprise. Essentially from a somewhat-viable competitor to the excellent frequent bus service in first-tier Chinese cities, our bus system degenerated to a level even the Americans would find revolting! How shameful! (Like I said with “ITH”s, if you can’t even get your act together then forget about “world-class” as a label, thanks. At least makes us sound more honest.)
Where? And how to fix (more like, damage control)
Enough ranting (I will probably compile a list of reports soon on trashed frequencies on many key trunk routes as a result of surging COVID infections among bus drivers…), let’s see if there’s a way to contain the damage done and get bus service back to normal as quickly as possible…
Firstly we have to assess the damage that has already been done. I’m pulling out yesterday’s (2 Sept) infographic since it’s the most recent, and do bear in mind one thing: because there is always a one step delay in statistical reporting (especially for fast-spreading viruses cue COVID delta), and we have to stay one step ahead of the virus in order to contain it, we need to plan two steps ahead of what we currently see in present data if effective ringfencing and restoration of bus service is our aim.
Thus it’s futile to initiate targeted operations aimed at individual bus interchanges, because after all they are merely a node in the network of bus routes criss-crossing the island. To securely lock the virus within its existing confines would require (unfortunately) broad sweeps, but even then, there are indeed pre-existing patterns among the clusters popping up here and there. It is thus from these patterns we should work from in order to contain damages.
Observe the infographic again. (You may also refer to the LTG websites on the respective bus interchanges) Notice how clusters for individual bus interchanges can be further grouped together into regional clusters.
I’ve roughly managed to glean a few regions (colour of the circle denotes dominant operator, green for that *ahem* certain operator taking over the Sembawang-Yishun Package in just two more days, yellow for the other mediocre ones in Loyang, and purple for the well-known SBS Transit) based on geographical location. Of course, not the best way to group them, since during revenue service there really isn’t much crossing over between interchanges in a regional group unless you speak of the (rare in number) long feeder routes, of which I can only think of two among these regions: 79 between Boon Lay and Jurong East (and even then not going into the interchange!) and 83 between Punggol and Sengkang (in a loop fashion, meaning the driver doesn’t get off at Sengkang).
But as it often so happens, such a geographical grouping of our afflicted nodes coincides with another form of grouping used by the operators, and by extension, LTA itself through the Bus Contracting Model (eeyer): depot – interchange allocation. In simpler terms (for bus fans): perm deployments.
We aren’t talking about hair perms…
Typically for the non bus-fans who may occasionally sit in to conversations among busfans, about the most common term (aside from the names of the four operators, bus models and such) being thrown around in busfan circles would be the short and humble “perm“. And it’s typically this term that throws many non-busfans off, wondering what exactly we are speaking of.
A perm, short for permanent deployment, is basically a fixed allocation of a certain bus to a certain service, where the bus will serve that particular service only for the forseeable future. Perms can change, of course, and have historically been so many times, that’s why I said forseeable future.
For instance, let’s say SBS7420B is allocated to service 69 (nice) for a long while. (Disclaimer to busfans: This is a fake photo (courtesy SG3094Y) and SBS7420B is actually a 72 perm. Sorry but SBST isn’t going to encourage 69420 jokes anytime soon.)
Anyway, busfans would describe this (hypothetical) scenario either as “SBS7420B is a 69 perm” or “SBS7420B perms 69”
Similarly, bus routes are also assigned to a depot permanently (And by permanently, I actually do mean permanently this time, because there really has been zero changes to route-depot allocation unless in the case of transfers due to the BCM!
As a further extension, bus interchanges, to a lesser extent, are also assigned to a certain depot in terms of control over the scheduling and deployments, this based on geographical location. It is this interchange – depot allocation, that happens to coincide with the infection paterns at the existing bus interchange COVID clusters!
Notice how bus services launching out of the interchanges in each circled “region” all come under the same depot? Between Boon Lay and Jurong East you have Tower Transit’s Bulim Depot (BUDEP, as well as SBS Transit’s Soon Lee, SLBP), between Toa Payoh and Bishan there is the Braddell Bus Park (BRBP) – AMK Depot (AMDEP) pair that just loves to do the very COVID-unsafe thing of cross-deploying regularly, and then there is the Ulu Pandan Depot (UPDEP) between Jurong East and Clementi Interchanges. So yes… it is no longer just a simple case of the virus spreading within a bus interchange, it is now jumping to others within the same region through the depots! (Just that the newspapers aren’t reporting this, because most busfans who have inklings about bus allocation work are like, (warning: untrue stereotypes) “edgy teens” and not serious propagandists at ST.
Now that we have established such a regional infection pattern, it should be rather obvious where we should start working to address a decently massive mess left behind, as a result of us deciding to pursue the “new normal” (herd immunity?) As an interesting aside, notice how none of the regional clusters I have outlined in the map above are coloured red, or located up north (and mid-west) where SMRT Buses is (as of writing, 3 Sept 2021).
The Plan
1. Isolation
(I could replace the title with “Secure and Contain”, but I don’t want to sound like another SCP simp despite my interest in that)
Since by now we’ve established that this is quite likely a case of transmission through the depots, the more logical thing to do, would be to (cue cryptic SCP voice) initiate containment on individual depots. Sounds a bit too “extreme”, and “disruptive”, you say? Well, that’s about the least disruptive method you can go to in order contain a fast-spreading COVID rather quickly without shutting down the entire bus network. Plus, at the current extent of infection, at most there would only be some pain experienced as a result of the other depots having to strain their resources a bit to support added operations (especially for the ones taking over Jurong West).
As the title of this section of the plan suggests, the depots affected will get locked down. And by locking down, I mean something like the blockades the students erected in the 1955 Hock Lee riots, minus the human chains: essentially, no one enters or leaves the bus depot. All the drivers at these depots stay at home (or in self-confinement in a five-star hotel) for two weeks and get some well-deserved rest after having worked so much harder in the initial stages of the pandemic to keep the country going. While they have their two-week (or four-week if the cases keep coming) “holiday”, affected bus services once covered by these depots will get taken over by others nearby. It’s quite a blessing that the ones hit this time are in close proximity to other (if I must add, big) depots, which means that there wouldn’t be too much added to deadheading miles, and schedules shouldn’t get affected by too much.
A quick glance at how the affected depots’ duties will get replaced:
- Bulim Depot: Operations returned to pre-BCM operators (i.e. SMRT KJDEP and SBST BBDEP)
- Braddell Bus Park: Operations transferred to Seletar Depot and Hougang Depot.
- The nearest Ang Mo Kio Depot is quite risky given how it’s tied to the Bishan cluster, so I’m going to be very cautious when dealing with this one.
- Ulu Pandan Depot: Operations transferred to Bukit Batok Depot and (aish) some transferral to SMRT’s KJDEP
- Loyang Depot: Operations transferred to SBST’s Hougang Depot and SMRT’s Woodlands Depot + Bus Park
As I’ve noted above, SMRT bus interchanges don’t seem to have notable clusters yet, a good thing. Let’s keep it this way: Delay Tower Transit’s reception of the Mandai Package by two weeks, so that we can at least keep the northern areas COVID-free, off our concern while we make ourselves anxious over clusters in central and west.
(P.S. Unfortunately I couldn’t get this published before TTS received the first tranche of the SYBP (Yishun ITH) on 5 September 2021. However, it will still make an impact even if we delay only the other two tranches, because one less interchange cluster = one less place to worry on our minds. Point on delaying Mandai transfer still stands.)
2. Optimisation
Typically I treat “optimisation” as a somewhat dirty word, since almost all the time this usually means squeezing out more cash from the passengers through all sorts of “ethical” (by capitalist definition with profit as the end goal, of course) loopholes, hacks, whatnots. However we have here a similar situation with constrained resources (erring on the safe side comes at a hefty cost, that’s why every country other than China has long given up on trying to cut COVID to zero cases), and for the lack of a better word, we should very much “optimise” bus services in trying times, but in a different sense of the word from your typical (a-certain-operator-I-will-not-name)-style “optimisation”.
You see, the problem right now is that the bus industry is facing a manpower crunch, taking place while we gradually reopen the economy and make all those trips we used to make before disaster struck. If we grossly simplify the predicament, it boils down to: less drivers having to serve more passengers. Higher demand, lower supply, thus requiring greater efficiency (and that was what I meant by “optimisation” in the earlier paragraph.) Thankfully for buses we still have quite a bit of space left to improve on in terms of this, largely in part due to the fact that our buses have varying capacities (the benefit of buying a myriad of models?)
Add this on to the fact that much to our chagrin a scene like this often pops up, especially (and very maddeningly), during peak hours: one waits at the bus stop for ages (in Singaporean time-short context, anything more than 10 minutes is “ages”, yet some busy routes still commit the sin of poor frequency), watching the crowds increase to a sizeable amount, hoping for a double-deck (or a bendy, for the few select routes that have them) bus to arrive, and then lo and behold, a single-deck (worse if it’s a Citaro, see here for why) slowly crawls into the bus stop. Welcome to Tokyo… buses?
Yeah, point being, there’s way too many single-deck perm buses in our trunk route fleets that could potentially be upgraded into a higher-capacity ride.
When bus drivers eventually become fewer in number (Toa Payoh has almost 100 bus drivers taken offline thanks to a tiny virus, can’t imagine its impact on scale of operations for the dozen or so major trunk routes departing every few minutes), frequency will have to be the first thing to go unless LTA decides to prematurely introduce autonomous buses, a bitter compromise to the virus, but always able to be made up for by swapping out all single-deck perms on trunk services with double-deckers (or bendies). (Before someone pulls the “oh there’s single-deck perms for a reason: we don’t have that many DDs” card, allow me to introduce you to the miserable A95s and B9TL WEGIIs rotting in their depots as “storage buses“)
I intended, at one point, to cover this frequency – capacity tradeoff for bus service, (brief mention in my 6 months post), well, here’s a rough sneak peak of what I think about it. Of course, if you ask me, I’d have preferred the frequency option, but eh, work with whatever we have right now. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?
(There’s also a second source of high-capacity vehicles to pull from: the double-decks used on feeder services could easily be replaced with single decks with more standing space… Also holds true for bendies: at least half of the 50 or so Citaros on busy service 858 should get replaced by the route’s former workhorse which got progressively deployed to feeder routes in Choa Chu Kang…)
Then for the routes that simply can’t have double-decker buses because height restrictions are oh-so-annoying, that’s where the freed-up buses should go: because expanding on capacity is not an option, the strive for frequency becomes ever more important. Of course, if those routes happen to have Citaro perms (and yes, most of them do), then of course, a swapping of fleet is in order.
For those who like details: a bit more on exactly how this should be gone about: the first perm buses to go on busy trunk routes will be none other than the Mercedes-Benz Citaro vehicles, notorious for their cramped interiors and overall being unproductive in times like these, followed by the Euro V variant of the MAN A22 (has a similar problem but at least Gemilang bothered to cut certain seat rows to a 1+1 and 1+2 configuration to expand standing space) and Scania K230UB, before finally axing the buses with dual wheelchair spaces. In this priority the single decker perm vehicles are to be replaced with double-decker buses (because however much I point to depot storage, I know they and the spare fleet combined still cannot pull off a perfect one-to-one swap of the single-decker fleet). And while doing this it will definitely involve a fair bit of transitions across the operators, cause for one it is a known fact that SMRT has a double-decker surplus in their fleet (not exactly sure how the SYBP transition will affect this) while the other three are short on high-capacity vehicles to varying extents. At this point I’d tell those operator boundaries to go screw themselves! (If we could rip out all the logos from the buses and allocate them around freely (with adequate measures i.e. deep cleaning + disinfection in place), then I’d be more than happy, since a particularly big problem with the existing BCM is that stupid rule against deploying across depots and between operators…)
As for the bendy bus fleet… first and foremost, its involvement in Yishun feeders has got to go. No qualms about that. (Like with double-deckers on service 334, too often I see bendies bunching on service 807… with practically no one on board. Surely a downgrade to a rigid bus will do? The 10 bendies are desperately needed elsewhere.) Then we’d have to put them where they’re needed the most. In this case, what comes to mind is the few bus services with high demand, but height restrictions, most prominent among them being service 858. Again as I said earlier, screw the rules, send the buses where they’re needed most! (I don’t know what’s with LTA and silo culture, but well…)
3. Remove unneccessary regulation
In a not-so-long-ago past when SMRT and SBST were happily operating their buses in their respective corners without interference from LTA, a common practice (especially in resource-tight SMRT) was to cross-deploy between the depots as and when was needed, and to the delight of busfans from a decade ago cameos of this sort were very very common.
![Farewell] TIB838H - Singapore's First Articulated Bus (SMRT Buses) - YouTube](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8xxfboGW2Sg/maxresdefault.jpg)
Unfortunately with the rollout of BCM came new “strict” measures that LTA claimed would “improve” bus services, and those new regulations in terms of deployments are not as well-received as the more controversial OTA/EWT (which is the most visible part of the BSRF) which at least has both its supporters and detractors equally loud in their stands. Aside from the more well-known regulation against placing pre-2014 demonstrator units into revenue service (thus dashing any hopes of ever riding, say a Scania double-decker or the Gemilang-bodied replacement unit for the poor CDGE burnt to a crisp in a 2010 depot fire), a lesser-known regulation in place forbids cross-deploying between bus depots that have already come on board the BCM scheme (i.e. Bulim, Loyang, Ulu Pandan and Seletar) and discourages the practice for the existing ones.
The reasoning (I suspect) behind it is likely a case of simplifying the fleet management: when fleet exchanges between the depots ceases firstly it’s less administrative headache when the time comes for a bus package to change hands, and secondly, to prevent operators with more than one package on hand to “cheat” (what’s wrong with that if it provides better bus service though?) by transferring buses across depots, because naturally, inequalities are bound to exist when the fleet is divided across 14 bus packages! (Loyang’s dismal shortage of high-capacity buses and abominably high number of Citaros comes to mind)
However if one has paid attention to the details of the plan above, you should know that to cater to increasing demand with less manpower would definitely entail having to do a complete reshuffle of the fleet, something that will be beneficial overall to bus service as a whole, but impossible with this pesky regulation in place.
Actually, screw it. BCM guidelines were written in 2016, for the context of year 2016. In 2021, things have changed (even though BCM is only 4 packages through and just entering its second term). There needs to be a review, and a consistent one at that, for whatever gets written in the rule book for the public bus industry. This particular one aimed at bureaucratic simplification, is not helpful to the bus system in a crisis. Scratch that, not helpful to bus service, anytime.
What is there to be lost if bus operators do not abide by this rule? Nothing! What is to be gained from non-compliance? Everything! From the start, the prohibition of cross-package deployments of buses was a misguided step. (To let LTA manage the whole fleet and decide where buses should be allocated to was a bigger one, considering how there is still a non-equilibrium of supply and demand even before COVID went kaboom among our bus drivers…) It is bureaucratic red tape like this, that often inhibits progress, and reduces the overall responsiveness of the entire system in general to sudden situations. At best, it is a fair-weather friend of those doing menial paperwork. At worst, it is a roadblock in the way of a fire engine rushing to put out a blazing fire at an oil refinery.
Why retain certain things if they do not improve the overall situations? (LTA’s a bad socialist, but they’re even worse capitalists at that, LMAO)
4. Reallocation
This section of the plan to bolster the public bus industry against a manpower crunch should be the most straightforward for its title. I mean, what else can it mean to reallocate resources when necessary?
I’ve probably covered the bus side of resource reallocation already, almost to the extent of making this another boring internal work report. To sum up: Swap out as many single-deck perm buses on trunk bus routes as possible and replace them with double-deckers or bendies, sourced from LTA storage, the depot spares, and feeder perms, and reallocate these buses to services that cannot have high-capacity buses due to various reasons.
I briefly remarked at the opening stage of this post on how havoc wrecked on the bus industry may have unironically caused the unapologetic bus-haters to reconsider their stance and show at least somewhat an appreciation for the irreplaceable role they play in the overall public transport system in general. If it takes a painful downing of a critical part of the overall network to get them to appreciate the role of buses, so be it. Yet we can’t just sit back and watch the trains get overwhelmed, because that wouldn’t make us any better than those who wish for the demise of bus transportation.
By now the fleet reshuffle going on on the bus side of the overall public transportation network should have saved up a fair bit of resources (because the trimming sometimes does result in more than what was desired, and after crisis is over definitely a lot of fattening up of bus service is in order). The result of taking on a “crisis” mode for the bus system would mean a higher demand to supply ratio, (simplified terms: more people waiting at the bus stop for fewer buses).
As a result, some of that demand will have to shift back to the rail system. Kind of inevitable given the circumstances, but admittedly trains are more “efficient” (by driver to passenger ratio). Then comes a problem: It’s quite well-known that even in the pre-COVID past when the fledging bus system was still running at its full capability to shoulder as much of the passenger load as possible, the trains were still epicly crowded during peak hours, especially so for the two oldest lines that were serving most of the higher-populated mature HDB towns. Now that the bus system is operating on survival mode and has to unfortunately cut some of its service because of a manpower problem, the trains are ever more important, and boosting their capacity to be able to pick up some of the slack again is of paramount importance.
It’s quite unfortunate that Singapore’s rail lines were planned with much foresight, capacity-wise. Unlike Hong Kong or older Chinese metro systems, we have practically zero room to expand the capacity of individual trainsets, and for the short-term demand we are looking at right now, such an idea is out of the window anyways. Thus leaving us with increasing the frequency of train service (consistently frequent, all day) as the only option to increase the carrying capacity of these rail lines. 2 minutes, all day, would be a great start.
And once again, hopefully this round of Covid-linked damages done to the bus industry will give rise to greater appreciation, or at least an understanding, that buses do matter, even if policy direction the last few years suggest otherwise. To all the bus drivers out there, stay strong, stay safe, know that the transport enthu community is behind your back.
TLDR:
- Get rid of bureaucratic impediments
- Some rules have got to go. They’re irrelevant and unhelpful.
- Notably, the one against cross-deployment between bus packages.
- Some rules have got to go. They’re irrelevant and unhelpful.
- Isolate the affected bus depots, lock them down, replace their role with other depots.
- Swap out as many single-decker perms in trunk services as possible with double-decker buses. This increases the capacity of the limited number of buses we can run with limited manpower.
- Increase all-day train frequency to make up for bus service shortfall.
And it isn’t just when large numbers of bus drivers get COVID can this plan come in handy. It works for practically any manpower crunch that the bus industry may face at any point, so even if this crisis may be over by the time this post is out, please don’t chuck this into the trash, LTA, for you may need it another time.
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SG Transport Critic 
4 thoughts on “The COVID-stricken bus industry — a few proposed measures”