In the event of a train disruption…

Touch wood beforehand first, since the last time I wrote about a disruption related to the Thomson East-Coast Line 18 months ago, this blog got into considerable trouble thanks to someone who was incapable of reading nuance…

Many of the good “hype-able” things that happened over the course of last week, alas, didn’t last very long, getting themselves into their own versions of sh*t before the week was even half over. The BYD K10 unit that debuted on 851 was left abandoned at Yishun Interchange for the entire later half of the day due to (presumably) a degraded battery that left it immobile on its debut, the Euro 6 units that debuted on Service 24 got themselves into an accident by Wednesday. And of course, when the TEL team decided to conduct a stress-test run of the entire line up to Stage 3, the line crippled itself from a signal fault.

At the very least, TEL passengers like me did finally get to experience (*inhales because I can’t believe it*) decent train frequencies. You know, the “rapid transit standard” kind I was talking about in my second review of the line. 53 trains were deployed along the entire length of Stages 1 through 3, up from the existing 15 or so.

This was taken just an hour before shit went awry on the TEL

But not for long unfortunately, as TEL service was soon brought to a rude, abrupt halt by a signal fault (probably somewhere along Stage 3). 19 trains stuck, 6 between stations, passengers trapped for half an hour, bridging buses activated, mad rush to fix the fault and remove trains, typical train breakdown nonsense, you know. Upsetting, literal cold water poured over everyone who was hoping for the 48-hour stress test to go to completion, thus signifying Stage 3 being fit for revenue service.

I’m not going to delve into the disruption per se and what exactly caused it given everything is still pending investigation. In any case, I’ve already laid out what is to be done to prevent such mishaps from occuring again in future, though how applicable they are to a line that is still in the stage of commissioning new stages is sort of questionable. You can go read that post which still applies to a fair number of train disruptions today.

Rather, I’ll be talking instead about the response to a train disruption, in other words the action plan taken after things go haywire and chaos breaks out inside stations and tunnels. As shown by some events that occured on Wednesday, it seems that even that needs a lot of improvement on.

Retracting statements

I previously wrote somewhere (couldn’t find the exact post, forgot where I said it) on this blog in one of the posts related to train disruptions, on our response to a train disruption:

“We have improved our response to train disruptions in the years following 2011, where protocols to deal with passenger dispersion and alternate travel arrangements have been put in place. Yet however… (insert rant)”
I said something along these lines, can’t recall the exact words either

Unfortunately it seems, this seems to be no longer true, as the exact opposite occurred as the entirety of our newest MRT line got shut down for a few hours on Wednesday.

A friend was present on site, headed for an examination in school and his recounted experience of the alternate arrangements that were made while trains remained stalled in tunnels was… not the most positive, to say:

The whole saga unfolded over 20mins, commencing around 11.30am. I am not writing to complain about the TEL disruption itself, but rather the way commuters were treated by the staff deployed.

A friend of mine was about to take the TEL from Woodlands to Upper Thomson. By then the train service had already resumed. However, a staff told her to leave the station and take the free bridging bus (FBB) instead. This is my first complaint. Why was she told to take the bus despite the train service being available?

Continuing the story, she went up and met me at W’lands Stn Exit 5 where the southbound FBB is supposed to stop. When we reached the stop, we asked the staff stationed there if there was FBB service, to which they confirmed the service was running. We waited 15 minutes without a bus. This is complaint 2. Such a long waiting time for the bridging bus – 3 times the interval of the train service.

Finally, we saw the FBB approaching – SMB1476P with the TEL EDS. I got up to flag the bus, but the bus was on the rightmost lane and it simply skipped the stop, despite there being passengers at the stop who wanted to board! There were also passengers in the bus, of which I’m sure some wanted to alight at Woodlands. I turned to the staff to enquire why the bus skipped the stop, but all of them had left to eat at the nearby coffee shop. I caught up to them and asked. They responded that FBB service had ended, hence the bus skipped the stop. ?????

Why did the staff at the MRT Station tell my friend to take the bus when the FBB service had supposedly ended?
Why did the staff at the bus stop say that there was still FBB service when there wasn’t?
Why did the staff just leave the bus stop without telling the passengers at the bus stop who were waiting for the FBB that the service had ended? Multiple people were left stranded at the bus stop, waiting for the next FBB, which wouldn’t even come because the service had allegedly ended. This is very irresponsible behaviour of the staff.
Why did the bus captain skip the stop despite there being passengers waiting to board (and probably alight)? If the FBB service had already ended, as the staff said, why did the bus still carry passengers and display the TEL FBB EDS?

The incidents above have caused great confusion and delay. To make matters worse, I was on my way to school to take an examination. Had I been late for the exam due to this, I would not have had a valid reason because official records indicate that the train service had resumed at the point of my story.

I am immensely disappointed and angry at the staff at the train station as well as the bus stop. I really pity the other commuters whose journeys have also been delayed by the bus skipping the stop.

From that account alone, if one wasn’t bothered to read through, there were quite a lot of areas in which SMRT (which handled almost all of the response procedures, including the bridging bus services) screwed up over the course of just a few hours alone on Wednesday, including but not limited to:

Failure to activate adequate bridging services
Terrible miscommunication between OCC / stations / staff / passengers
Unprofessional provision of bridging services
Staff who literally went offline on the job (the exact opposite of what public transport workers should be, bzzt)
Conflicting messaging (as a result of point 2 above) confusing passengers
Overall a lack of coordination and coherence when things go wrong

Let’s start with the low hanging fruit, the ones that honestly shouldn’t have gone wrong in any circumstances regardless.

Communications

The one thing I was left wondering as I read that complaint letter above, really was: how the heck did the telephone game from Mandai OCC go so wrong, this poor guy here was left waiting for a non-existent bridging bus even though train services had resumed??

Not to mention that SMRT staff were reported abandoning passengers at bus stops after they were notified that train services had resumed, and FBB (bridging bus service, basically) service ceased. Could they not have simply informed waiting passengers at the bus stops to go back into the station to take the trains that were now running normally again?

Honestly, the one thing that still shocks me a lot to this day, whenever a train breakdown occurs, is how we are really underutilising our means of (if I may add, versatile) mass communication across our public transport network to swiftly disseminate information to vast crowds of passengers. If there is anything more underutilised than our tip-up seats on the later KSF trains (which became the topic of an entire TODAYonline article featuring my very own post from last year), it is these screens that appear in various forms around our public transport network:

taken when frequencies on TEL were a total scam

Like honestly, given the amount of blank spaces that are typically left on these screens, or the amount of air time dedicated to repeating the same old advertisements over and over again (I can confidently claim that more people stare at the old STARiS map with the blinking LED dots than the new ones that are half advertising space)… why couldn’t these resources be better used to disseminate information across the entire network?

For instance, should what occurred on Wednesday happen again, such screens across the entire public transport network could literally have a small fraction of their screen space set aside for emergency updates warning passengers of a train disruption crippling the entire TEL. That would have prevented more passengers from flooding to the affected areas, thus further clogging up the area and making dispersion efforts by staff along the affected sector even more of a headache. It’s not that apparent for a fault affecting a minor line like the TEL now, but imagine if this was applied to a train disruption along say, the East-West Line used by millions daily. With advance notice, imagine the amount of hassle saved from fretting over more people pouring into disaster zones completely not knowing of a disruption ahead.

Such screens placed in every (SMRT) MRT station are a good start.

Even better if we could expand this to include the relevant messaging functions available on our bus infrastructure too. You know, people can flock to disaster zones unknowingly not just by train, but also by bus, where they’d take a bus to an affected station without knowing train service is unavailable until they reached. Letting passengers know in advance shit has gone wrong, and letting them figure out alternative travel pathways to avoid entering the storm matters a lot to crowd management work when trains break down. Even better if the screens could recommend the alternate travel options themselves, but at this point let’s just start with something basic: a system-wide warning feature.

Other critical bits of information could also be relayed through such screens to passengers too, thus avoiding lots of miscommunication errors as messages get passed through multiple layers of humans. For instance, screens at a bus stops near MRT stations could be linked to the station control office and messages directly relayed to passengers through such screens. Bridging bus service activated? There you go. No more FBBs, go back and take the train? Tell them via such screens. Don’t let them sit there idly giving off excess heat for nothing other than a static display of bus route arrival timings, or meaningless advertising that isn’t very effective either. Given the lack of manpower available especially for newer lines, which also tend to be the lines with stations that have many, many exits, we need to think of ways to harness the technology that we already have to better tackle communications during train disruptions. It’s not rocket science, and I’m not even reinventing the wheel for some incompetent higher-ups in charge here — it’s literally utilising what we have for more purposes comfortably!

Hell, we’ve moved past THIS kind of bus stop arrival displays already:

Our new digital screens can be configured however we want. That’s a lot of potential waiting to be tapped, so why not tap it???

Also, just saying, it would be greatly appreciated if LTA could somehow come up with a way to reflect FBB arrival timings on bus stop arrival boards too… Saves commuters a lot of frustration wondering when the FBB will arrive, and at least lets us know how well (or how terribly) the FBB service is doing at handling the affected crowds. If it’s a dumb B5LH coming our way in 15 minutes like what happened, at least let us know beforehand so we take another bus and avoid such clown situations.

SMRT will also have to look into the training of staff (especially along the TEL) with regard to contingency plans, since the execution of those on Wednesday was nothing short of straight-up scuffed. It was probably the first time since 2011 we saw MRT staff caught in such a pants-down unprepared state, which is just a huge letdown to the decade or so of progress we have supposedly made since then.

Some words about FBBs

Enough has been reported on the sorry state of the FBBs that were activated — a steaming haphazard unprofessional mess, where BCs reportedly skipped stops with both passengers onboard and waiting at the bus stop. Not to mention, terrible waiting times for the FBB services. Honestly given the way FBB services are set up locally (spoiler: afterthought), I can partially not blame SMRT (who also ran the FBB services), but of course there is only so far one can not blame them for before their own ridiculous bumbling knocks them over.

Let me be frank. I am not a fan of bridging bus services being activated when trains break down. You will see why once I explain a bit on how these FBBs work.

After SMRT terminated its Task Force 50 reserves a while back, there effectively remains no permanent pool of operational resources to draw from for the express purpose of providing bridging services during a train breakdown. Rather instead, the way FBBs currently operate is that they are provided in the form of “shuttle routes” (which are also activated during early closures/late openings), fixed routes plying portions of rail lines that are selectively activated depending on the affected sector. These shuttles are then assigned based on locality to the 12 bus depots in Singapore.

Now, rather than doing it the TF50 way of supplying all these bus depots with even some meagre resource pool (of buses, bus captains, or the like) in order to be able to operate FBBs without being at the expense of the depot’s own existing bus fleet, the current protocol is for the bus depots in charge of the specific shuttles to cough up the buses (and BCs) themselves to operate FBBs when trains go haywire. In short, FBB buses are drawn from the spare fleet in bus depots, which is typically kept for purposes of ensuring service levels as the “perm” fleet undergoes periodic regular maintenance, or in the event the buses themselves break down and need replacements. So how big is this spare fleet, you ask?

Let’s pick my least favourite bus depot (with perms), BBDEP:

Only eighteen (you read that right, one eight, 18) buses are set aside for the spare fleet. Maybe throw in the two or three buses used specifically for SBS Transit employee shuttles and you get twenty. Still, this number of 20 buses is the maximum spare fleet available for use, because remember that the spare fleet is often easily consumed for purposes such as replacing broken buses, filling service gaps when periodic maintenance is a thing. So when say the East-West Line (which BBDEP is responsible for doing the FBB for) breaks down, you will be hard pressed to see BBDEP send all 20 or so spare buses out for FBB services. This is before you factor into account BC unavailability (there aren’t that many spare BCs waiting around in the depots too) and manpower shortage in general which further cuts the available fleet. Which results in even worse service levels for FBB services. I’m not even talking about getting FBBs to match the frequency of the rail service they replace — many times even the 10 minutes interval standard of trunk bus routes is hardly achieved precisely because of this lack of buses.

Number of spare buses in depots (based on quick SGWiki searches) below. Brackets denote the line the depot serves as FBB ops hub for.

AMDEP (CCL) – 36 buses
BNDEP (DTL3 / EWL) – 46 buses
BRBP (CCL) – 15 buses
BBDEP (EWL / DTL2) – 18 buses
HGDEP (NEL / CCL / SK/PG APM) – 38 buses
SEDEP (?) – 36 buses
SLBP (EWL / DTL2) – 36 buses
UPDEP (DTL) – 58 buses
- Disclaimer: Most of these get consumed during regular service thanks to Causeway and Johor traffic madness that requires additional buses sent on 160 and 170
KJDEP (NSL / BPLRT) – 77 buses
- Disclaimer: SMRT adopts a “semi-flexi-deploy” approach, where “spare bus” is basically another way of saying “flexi-deployment”. About 75% of these spare buses under KJ and WL, existing on paper, is usually found somewhere on the main public bus network operating to meet demand somewhere. Seems like a lot, but when push comes to shove, there isn’t much really.
WLDEP (TEL) – 42 buses
- What applies to KJDEP applies to WL too. That’s why the TEL FBB frequency was notoriously trash on Wednesday…

So what do the operators tend to do when trains break down and they need to fulfil their FBB obligations? They ransack their perm fleet. (Perm = permanently deployed on revenue service) If you’re unclear what this means in layman terms, it means that buses that are currently running on scheduled routes (aka the “numbered” services) are taken away from trunk or feeder services to serve on FBB routes. Effectively you could think of this as “a new superlong trunk route” being created out of thin air when trains go down, vanishing back into thin air again when rail service resumes. Except these “routes that appear out of thin air” are utilising existing bus resources, thus competing with the existing trunk/feeder bus network for buses and manpower.

Those more well-seasoned with the intricacies of operating public transport might recognise this phenomenon as one of spreading thin your resources, which is also one of the reasons why it’s quite foolhardy to just reach straight for the new-route box whenever new needs arise as a first resort. Well, FBBs are a perfect example of spreading thin our limited bus resources at the worst time possible. You know, a literal train breakdown is a massive mini-migration population crisis we have at our MRT stations around Singapore, where it is even more important that our alternative travel pathways such as trunk bus routes be bolstered in order to best be able to soak up the overflowing demand. And opening FBB routes, diverting the bus fleet from trunk services… is the exact opposite of how one should be going about doing that.

(Another reason why FBBs aren’t that great: suddenly mobilising BCs for the job may cause much confusion, resulting in horrid situations breaking out such as skipping stops, losing their way, or whatever could possibly go wrong when you just shove the keys into someone’s hands and tell them “go drive a FBB now”.)

Rethinking bridging bus service

Making all bus services at affected MRT stations free of charge to travel in the event of a train disruption is a good move on LTA’s part, since the entire public bus network becomes possible alternate routes to dissipate passengers from overflowing stations. And for the matter, it reflects that the main bus network still shows up on LTA’s radar.

Earlier I mentioned that FBBs by their very nature divert resources from typical bus operations, resulting in worse service for all when better service is most urgently needed. Therefore, I propose that rather than spreading thin our operational resources when trains break down, we should instead consolidate them. What does this mean?

Remember our spare bus fleet from previously?

Remember what their original purpose (i.e. before a train disruption) was? That’s right, to maintain service levels for the existing bus network regardless of incidents that might affect service levels otherwise. So why not let the spare bus fleet instead continue doing what it has been doing best, i.e. keeping the trunk bus network alive even when things go wrong? Or do that, but better. Instead of removing service from trunk routes and giving it to FBB service, we could directly add more service to trunk bus routes, especially those that duplicate MRT lines a lot.

Unclear what I mean? Let me illustrate to you how this could have been hypothetically carried out on Wednesday:

Here are the services that could have seen their service levels bumped up as the TEL shut itself down, by location:

MDDEP 856: Woodlands – Woodlands North – Sembawang – Yishun

Woodlands North station is that cul-de-sac to the left

For those who were getting to and fro Woodlands North station, they could consider taking the North-South Line to Woodlands or Sembawang and then take bus 856, the only bus that serves Woodlands North anyway. Or for those going via Sembawang, bus 167 is another option, which I’ll talk about below.

WLDEP 901/M: Woodlands – Woodlands South

Woodlands South located at the junction where the loop begins

Unfortunately for those at Woodlands South, they really require a feeder to get out of where they are, since that feeder is the only route they have. Or they could try (Long) Feeder 901M which gets them to Admiralty MRT too…

MDDEP 167/980: Sembawang – Springleaf – Tagore – Upper Thomson – Caldecott (almost) – Novena

These services practically duplicates the entire TEL on and off for its entire length (up to Stage 2), with the routes themselves spanning the entire north-south length of Singapore. Unfortunately, as is common practice at Mandai, frequencies on both routes are not the most ideal. That’s also where service improvements are the most visible and needed too, provided MDDEP hasn’t already consumed enough buses for utterly incomprehensible PR stunts to attract the hearts of short-sighted bus enthusiasts… Also, they’re both victims of the same long trunk problem I described last week. Both are excellent candidates for rapid-stop routes, which shouldn’t be too hard to implement anyway given how the entire northern half of Services 167 and 980 are practically nothing but wilderness.

BRBP 235: Caldecott – Braddell – Toa Payoh

Feeder 235, like I said in my post evaluating Toa Payoh public transit, is special in the sense that it can technically be classed a long-feeder route by nature of it linking multiple major nodes together despite its feeder name. Since the NSL might become a major “alternative route” for passengers anyway, those who took the train down to Caldecott headed for destinations along the Circle Line or beyond could take bus 235 from Braddell to Caldecott. Then again, with 235 being one of Singapore’s best feeder routes (only second to Toa Payoh feeder 238 frequency-wise), there really isn’t that much room to increase service levels to until the same problems plagueing Service 238 haunt this route too…

MDDEP 825 / SEDEP 265: Yio Chu Kang – Lentor – (Mayflower – Ang Mo Kio for Svc 265)

Both feeders adequately link the next-most disconnected TEL station (after Woodlands South) to nearby hubs where other journeys could be made. 265 could certainly see improvements, given how the current set-up of running only 7 buses on a route with a 1h20min runtime is not quite conducive to short waiting times… And 825 has demonstrated its ability to handle full 12m rigid buses given the many stunts MDDEP has been pulling instead of focusing on their core mission, which would help with capacity in such a case scenario.

HGDEP 163: Sengkang – Lentor – Upper Thomson – Toa Payoh

Need I say more? A connection to the North-East Line activated when the TEL goes down, unexpected gift I suppose?

SEDEP 162/M / AMDEP 52 / 410: (Novena for 162) – Upper Thomson – Bright Hill – Bishan / Ang Mo Kio

Some of you might have noticed that Bright Hill station wasn’t very included, so here it goes.

Again, this isn’t too much rocket science at work right here — I’m literally just using whatever routes we have right now, and improving their service levels to cope with a train disruption. It would work better for the simple reason that consolidating service on your existing network means your buses arrive quicker and crowd dispersion is faster.

But what happens, you say, if such a disruption hits one of the core lines and you have people trying to get home from work to their homes in one of the fringe or periphery towns?

Remember this kind of service?

I’ve blasted CDS services before for a wide variety of reasons, but that’s really just because of how they’re set up. Recap:

Trash service spans (the CDS with the most service has only 4 trips in one direction per day)
Low capacity provided (most CDS routes use SDs, despite DDs being ideal)
Terrible intervals even between the 2 or so buses that operate daily
Combining a feeder role with an express role… ???

But they do have one thing done right, namely the act of getting passengers home (or to work) faster than the trains are capable of even in peacetime.

So that got me thinking, why not operate free ad-hoc CDS trips if the major rail lines get rudely disrupted by technical faults? For instance if the North-South Line decided to break a third rail again (ding ding 2011), we could activate extra CDS trips for free to the towns of Ang Mo Kio, Yio Chu Kang, Yishun and Sembawang, giving passengers a quick fast ride home and quickly removing pressure from downtown stations.

One might have noticed something about my proposal to increase service on be it trunk or CDS routes during a train disruption: multiple depots are involved even if it’s just a single line disruption. Well that’s an imperative for greater collaboration between bus depots, fewer bureaucratic boundaries and more coordination between depots and even PTOs, among many. Because now when the response of the bus system to a train disruption is to bump up trunk services in general, the entire network must respond quickly and adequately. How can that be achieved if each company, or heck each individual depot does its own thing?

Of course, strengthening our response to train disruptions doesn’t give the rail operators a free pass to slack and let reliability go down the drain, something that they have hopefully learnt from the shitshow of the 2010s where Singaporeans found themselves hard pressed to trust the reliability of their rail network. But with stronger defenses in place, we can and will be able to get two and two together more quickly, minimising the impacts of train breakdowns on our journeys and hopefully give MRT staff more breathing room to restore normal services quicker.

Strengthen communications and alternate transport protocols. That’s what the TEL disruption of last Wednesday has taught us, and for us to act upon so hopefully, the pain of December 2011 does not go to waste. And of course, SMRT Trains has quite some answering to do with regard to what happened on Wednesday, still.

Touch wood again, both for myself and for Stage 3 of the TEL to proceed to completion and opening without much mishap again.

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