Header image: 1991 Concept Plan of “Regional Centers” and “sub-regional centers”, linked by MRT lines. Much of it has materialised today, except… Tekong :laugh:
With 716 square km of land area, a singular downtown core (or so as we think?), numerous HDB towns radiating out from it forming non-stop concrete jungles and virtually no countryside to be found, it is easy to think of Singapore as just one singular city-state, governed from Parliament House beside Clarke Quay, with a continuous urban fabric of built-up environment from Tuas to Tampines, Sembawang to Shenton. The messaging from the government and related planning authorities, perhaps for reasons of building national unity, continually hammer the message of Singapore being a “small” city, a little red dot barely visible on the world map.
But are we really that small? How then do we pack so much weight, in the form of our high population density and super-extensive urban development? Do traditional models of urban and suburban apply to the Singapore story? (That is, if we assume every HDB town a suburb)
A compact nation
It is well-known that Singapore is very dense and compact, population and urban development wise. However, we differ greatly from the megapolises of the world — New York, Beijing, Tokyo and Shanghai. We don’t cram glass and concrete towers several hundred meters tall in countless rows on end — that is a form of density, don’t get me wrong, but not our type.
These imposing skylines — which you can also enjoy here in their full glory in the CBD at Tanjong Pagar — are characteristic of a large downtown core that spans a large portion of the urban area, defined by highly mixed land usage, relatively loose zoning restrictions, and a generally higher proportion of retail and commercial spaces. Hence the characteristic downtown of skyscraper office towers and the associated 9-to-5 work hours (which is slowly changing), as well as the monocentric urban planning mentality that dominated urban planning circles for decades. It is also this sort of land use where the distinction between commuter rail and rapid transit becomes the clearest, within the context of a singular urban area. After all, downtown land use patterns are the most varied, hence allowing the formation of stable, all-day, multidirecrional demand on the transit network.
Let us take a look at Singapore’s urban structure. The downtown core where all the glitzy sky-high towers are located occupies a relatively small portion of the city in general. Whereas this might sprawl seemingly endlessly for other cities our size and bigger, downtown proper in Singapore is confined largely to the “atas” areas which we plebs also frequent due to work or leisure reasons, such as Orchard, Chinatown, Esplanade and Marina Bay. Another way of looking at it is to look at the stations for which the Travel Smart Journeys (TSJ) initiative was originally launched for, and note how little of the MRT network it originally covered. (Side note: TSJ was initially targeted for the CBD-going peak crowd, before being expanded to include the full MRT network)
Surely then, it just means we have a lot of suburb surrounding what little downtown we have, right? It’s still more complicated than that.
Many might think the effort to decentralise Singapore is a recent thing, and the examples that come to mind most prominently might be Tengah, Jurong Lake District, and the Punggol Digital District. What fewer might be aware of is that this has been a concerted effort since the 1990s, about the same time as we were building up the Initial System of the MRT.
Three MRT stations on the NSEWL differ significantly from the others in peripheral land use — Tampines, Woodlands and Jurong East. One might notice in the vicinity of these non-CBD stations not endless rows of HDB blocks but instead a few office towers and large-scale commercial spaces of moderate size and height. This was the government’s first attempt at decentralising Singapore away from the central urban core which was beginning to show its inability to handle the entire white-collar workforce of the country at the time, and were also internally referred to as “little CBDs” on the edge of Singaporean territory, forming one large ring extending roughly about 30km from the downtown core. The key projects that come to mind today when decentralisation is mentioned — PDD, JLD and Tengah — are merely additions to this ring.
(7/4/24 edit: Found a pretty nice URA draft plan of Woodlands’ Regional Center, the “mini-CBD” located around the then-new Woodlands MRT and appropriately branded as such. You can tell the conscious effort to decentralise the CBD even before Woodlands was served by the MRT system!)
A decade or so later as the Circle Line was built up a second, smaller “ring” was also established at stations where the CCL intersected the key compass lines — Bishan, Paya Lebar and Buona Vista, with the latter two substantially transformed into spaces for business and retail, similar to land use patterns downtown.
All these efforts are based upon Concept Plan 1991, which called for the establishment of a bimodal urban distribution of future urban development in Singapore. Upon the basis of the existing CBD in Shenton Way and its corresponding urban fringes comprising Tanglin and Orchard, a mirrored density pattern was created starting from the furthest-flung towns in Singapore, where large, regional centers were created, and then “regional subcenters” located along the orbital corridor known today as the CCL. Place Woodlands, Bishan and the city area on a line and visualise the density graph. Concept Plan 1991, in essence, called for this line to be shifted in a circle with the existing downtown as the hinge across the entire Singapore, forming rings of higher and lower density throughout, organised along the radial MRT corridors.
However, the polycentrism of Singapore goes far beyond just the regional centers and subcenters explicitly identified by the URA. Given our sheer density in housing, I contend that it’s most helpful to analyse our land use and transport problems from a town scale, defined perhaps by the HDB planning boundaries, but more significantly around developmental clusters of amenities that form natural, or semi-natural borders with each other through scattered consolidation. And it’s partially why this blog runs a “Town-By-Town” series — the health of the transport system nationwide is determined, in part, by the health of the transport systems in each town and how they interact with each other.
Consider a small European town, or American county. (A Chinese county town would work too, at the scales we’re working at)
At the center of a stereotypical European town is a cathedral (almost always named after some random saint) or castle (because their history is literally warlords), which formed the center of social activity in medieval Europe due to the marriage of church and state back in those days. Dwellings for the people of said European towns were scattered around everywhere else, with occasional amenities scattered around elsewhere in the town too.
For a more concrete example, consider the case of Verona, population 257,000, which is equivalent to that of Tampines town:
(On a side note, Verona was one of the small European towns whose style gave inspiration to the urbanist Huawei research campus in Dongguan, which I covered last year)
A central castle representing the political center of the city, surrounded by mixed-use, low-rise European apartments (mixed with cafes and shops on the street level) and infused with the occasional arena, additional church, market, public square, and other whatnot that make the city functional and whole.
Similarly, in an average Singaporean town, especially the mikrorayon-based ones planned prior to the early 2010s, follow a similar layout of a town center with food courts, markets and the like surrounded by an endless sea of high-rise HDBs with the occasional amenity like polyclinic, swimming complex, community center (oddly not positioned in more centrally prominent locations here, but anyway) inserted in between clusters of blocks in their own precincts. In effect, each town in Singapore is really just an entire European city but packed more densely with towering apartments instead of three-storey antique shophouses.
By contrast, suburban land use and planning are far less diverse than the multi-faceted urban form found in our HDB towns. Even in “transit suburbs”, the North American term for a suburb which is planned in a manner that’s more human-friendly than the soulless asphalt-based landscapes in car suburbs, an overwhelming portion of the land is still a monoculture of purely residential land, used strictly for building housing only. It is thus very much a misnomer to call our towns “suburbs”, even in relation to the downtown core, because it misses the nuances in our style of urban planning. From the perspective of transport planning, treating our towns as mere suburbs runs the grave risk of intensifying the monocentric downsides of a hub-and-spoke transport system! In particular, this mistake was made in Sengkang and Punggol (alongside the more suburban approach in urban planning), causing them numerous problems such as an overreliance on feeder routes (including the APM) and a lack of vibrancy in their housing precincts.
I thus propose a radically new model of examining urban development in Singapore. A stark departure from the conventional ideas of the urban-suburban divide here.
Singapore: The City of Cities
It’s time we moved beyond our understanding of the role our towns play in the urban fabric here. Instead, it’s more appropriate to think of our towns as cities in their own regard! Rather than mere suburbs appended to the periphery of the CBD, each town can and should be considered as distinct cities, yet packed adjacent to each other.
With an individual city being defined as a built-up environment that is largely self-sufficient in meeting the needs of its population, what Singapore has achieved through its town planning over the past decades has been to build a “city of cities”, with one large urban agglomeration consisting of a hub area, multiple regional centers, and numerous cities scattered across the remaining areas.
A similar concept exists in more recent times known as city clusters which are most notably employed by Chinese planners. Essentially, they play the role of further integrating cities together, sometimes even transcending provincial boundaries, to form larger regional entities that pack greater economic weight collectively. From an urban planning perspective this integration has enabled what were previously administratively separate cities to melt into one continuous urban fabric spanning the entire cluster, with the best examples being the gradual blending of Foshan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan into one big megapolis in Guangdong province, as well as the melting of Shanghai and Suzhou into one megacity located along the Chinese east coast. At some point, you simply don’t know when one city stops and another begins, and the names of the constituent cities merely give you positional context, rather than being of much sovereign significance.
Singapore has, before the Chinese pioneered urban cluster development, condensed the city cluster model into the scale of an individual city, with dense high-rise towns each housing the population of entire European cities arranged to fit beside one another in a scattered formation (although mostly based off the historical road system, at least back when we started). Each town is capable of meeting the basic needs of its residents (well, most can, and also we’re pushing this based on the assumption that residents aren’t picky), and travel to other “cities” is based purely out of choice and desire for better goods and services unavailable because of inevitable scarcity.
Numerous cities in East Asia are beginning to emulate the “city of cities” model as well — chances are, if you encounter a “New Town” or “New District”, you are most likely looking at an attempt at building an entire city within a larger urban limit, designed to meet its residents’ needs without excessive reliance on amenities elsewhere. They’re favoured due to their organisational ability that enables better management of development and population, as well as the necessary services (transport included) needed to support said population. Tl;dr, it’s an effective insurance against runaway monstrous density that is associated with the soul-crushing capitalist downtown mentioned at the start of the post, by enabling more granular planning that extends to individual blocks in each “micro-city” such that the rationality of centrally-guided urban planning permeates down to smaller units of development. The wards of Tokyo and administrative gu in South Korea serve similar roles in urban planning too, although many of them are still designed more like high-rise American suburbs than actual independent towns.
Did I tell you about how chaotic old Guangzhou was, with messy and disorganised rows of apartment blocks crammed together, separated by triple-decker motorways (because lack of space but insane traffic), and basically total anarchy in city planning being exhibited? Yeah that’s pretty much what one gets when the urban planners work with the notion of a single, homogeneous downtown core that usually ends up becoming a mush of everything without directed oversight. Thankfully I spent most of my Guangdong days in Shenzhen instead, where an approach more closely akin to the Singapore model was taken upon since the city’s founding in 1980.
Not sure if this rings a bell in you, but does “micro-city” sound familiar to something else that STC has previously explored? Let’s bring up our old friend who most likely, and most definitely inspired the planning of Ang Mo Kio town: the Soviet mikrorayon. A mikrorayon-based approach to urban planning, as is common in our HDB planning areas is what is needed to maintain the independent functioning of these urban zones to qualify as being “cities”. Mikrorayons are the building blocks that keep large cities functioning in a largely modular manner, without stressing the core to an extent seen in Tokyo and Seoul, enabling expansion without further compression. When zoomed out to the level of city clusters, a “mikrorayon” approach to inter-provincial development has enabled the Chinese to narrowly avoid the social ills of overcrowded capitalist cities with strained infrastructure, by offloading entire services for extra populations to peripheral cities.
With all that said, what does this imply for transport planning in Singapore then?
Gas, gas, gas
With the establishment and recognition of the fact that instead of being a singular city, the 716 square km comprising mainland Singapore contains numerous cities dotted across the island, the most significant awareness our transport planners must have is the need for speed.
A common observation here is how, for almost any given point A to B journey, driving is inevitably faster than taking public transport. Besides the nonexistent strategic transit priority here, as well as the hub-and-spoke network structure, another key reason is simply how speed is barely prioritised in our public transport services. Think of our lack of bus priority, flippant attitude towards degrading bus and train frequency on newer routes, and performance indicators that incentivise slower bus rides.
But by far the biggest reason why our bus speeds remain lower than the global average, and our trains doing not any better, is because of an institutional aversion towards, in particular, making buses run faster than just (as a reader likes to put it) local stoppertrons.
The decline of faster bus services is apparent to any bus observer, even the most recent ones. At the turn of the century, true bus signal priority was in force, albeit just for one bus route, the former Service 700 from Woodlands Checkpoint to the city. Since then, signal priority has been rendered impotent, bureaucratic regulations compel express buses to follow slow schedules, and expresses have been withdrawn or cut back severely in service. On top of that, LTA has not introduced a new bus service that can be truly called a trunk, or express route, for at least the past five years, with the mainstay of new bus routes comprising extremely short feeders with limited utility, or long feeders that are similarly limited in potential due to their short length.
Take for instance express 502, whose schedule instructs it to use 40 minutes to go from Toh Guan Rd (IMM) to Orchard Boulevard. By comparison, trunk service 7 which plies a nearly identical route from Clementi, reaches Orchard Boulevard in slightly less time, all while having to stop at every intermediate stop. At night, 7 covers the sector in 25 minutes, as opposed to the 35 minutes scheduled for 502.
What must be done to keep public transport relevant to the needs of residents in a city of cities? The key word, which I will hammer more than once in this post: make transit fast, and this includes buses, your most basic and core component of the public transport network.
I previously introduced rapid-stop services as the second way of making buses faster (besides non-stop express sectors) — calling at vastly fewer stops than their local stoppertron counterparts, providing faster rides while maintaining connectivity to each city located along the route.
Think of the Pearl River Delta regional railway lines, presently served by low-end bullet trains as a regional rail service. It spans many cities along the Pearl River Delta, serving as a highly valuable connection that enables it to function as one integrated entity, rather than the mere sum of its constituent cities. More importantly, it stops once (at most twice) at each city along the way, instead of the numerous stops that a conventional metro would have otherwise have made (Guangfo line being one such case, with 25 stops from southern Guangzhou to eastern Foshan)
The PRD regional railways is to the Pearl River Delta what rapid buses is to Singapore — by focusing on high-intensity intercity service, they enable other cities, otherwise perceived to be foreign, to fall somewhat comfortably within a 60-minute commute radius. For the smaller scale that Singapore has compared to the vast Pearl River Delta, a network of rapid-stop bus routes enable most inhabited parts of the island to fall within a 45-minute travel radius, a goal more worthy of pursuing than a CBD-centric “20/45” initiative that still entails a 90-minute ride (barely doable today) across the island. Remember, the Pearl River Delta is not just about funneling even more people and resources to Guangzhou and Shenzhen alone, but also about the balanced development of other cities located in the region. Similarly, all of Singapore benefits with faster public transport that shrinks travelling time between as many destination pairs as possible islandwide.
In the example of rapid-stop 851 presented in that previous post that I introduced the concept with, the cities of Yishun, Ang Mo Kio, Bishan and Bukit Merah are linked up to the CBD with a 60-minute ride end-to-end, and a guaranteed arrival at the CBD within 45 minutes regardless of point of origin along the route. A similar network of rapid-stopping bus routes will provide similar benefits across multiple corridors, thus bringing it to every town across Singapore. Additionally, the combination of rapid-stop bus routes with expressway sectors further shortens shortens the perceived distance between cities, and with our expressway network strategically positioned in close proximity to most cities, their value in tremendously boosting the speed of our notably slow buses is present, and even in their present form, not fully utilised, especially when long, meandering local-stop sectors negate travel time advantages brought about by brief expressway sectors much shorter than those found on the express buses in Hong Kong or Shenzhen.
Another noteworthy point in our land transport development historically is the use of the “diamond” in the design of our expressway network. Think your four cardinal directions, a square tilted 45 degrees (aka a diamond) with each direction as a corner, and two more lines connecting opposite corners of said diamond. Such was the guiding philosophy behind the creation of Singapore’s expressway network. From north to south is the CTE (and future NSC), from east to west is the PIE, from north to east is the TPE, north to west the BKE and KJE, south to east the ECP, and AYE connecting south to west. Previously I wrote that service shouldn’t be confined by the infrastructure. Here’s, it’s the opposite — the infrastructure is there, waiting for the service to fill it! This opens up a possibility that hasn’t been considered much: direct express bus services plying between the ends of the island, placing the cities on the opposite end of the island comfortably within a 30-minute travel time range too, thus accomplishing a feat even cross-island rapid-stop buses fail to achieve.
London recently launched a “Superloop” system of rapid-stopping buses forming a ring around the downtown. Similarly, a “Diamond Plan” of direct express buses linking north, south, east and west of Singapore forms our own network of fast regional bus connections.
Principally, this is crucial for public transport to be time competitive against driving, because in a scenario where the playing field between both modes are equal, the least public transport can, and should be doing, to play catch up in the race against time is to enable commuters equal access to land transport infrastructure available. If the expressway is available as a means for cars to speedily zip from one end of the island to another but no equivalent service is offered by public transport, its mode share (42%) won’t budge upwards against cars (36%) by much, despite our best efforts elsewhere. If we are to realise the MOT’s lofty goal of 75% public transport mode share by 2030 (that’s in at most 6 years), the public has to be convinced that trading their car keys for an ezlink card (or SimplyGo account, whatever) doesn’t incur a penalty on their time, or that it’s not significant enough anymore to suppress the other environmentally-conscious reasons that switchers may have.
Something else however, is still holding back our efforts to equal out buses and cars, where speed is concerned. And even the hypothetical direct express that makes zero stops in between suffers from this self-imposed limit upon ourself that stops us from truly realising a 1-hour travel radius nationwide.
Breaking limits
A longstanding regulation placed upon all buses and mid-sized commercial vehicles is a speed limit of 60km/h. Since the beginning of BCM, all buses have been required to be retrofitted with a mechanical speed limiter that disables the accelerator when the speed limit is reached. This of course, is our last hurdle to cross in making buses faster and more time competitive against, having eliminated the issue of local stopping, and hopefully the lack of transit priority on our roads. Especially on our expressways, where bus routes utilising them often ply on those non-stop sectors for considerable distances effectively as an “intercity express” that gets one to a neighbouring city in about 20 minutes. But as mentioned above, given the choice, who takes the intercity express when driving gets one there in half the time? (This group does exist: those whose choices are limited to a local-stopping rail service or an expressway bus, such as Bukit Panjang residents without a car) Our “intercity expresses” don’t get to exploit the much higher speed allowed on expressways to its fullest extent because of this additional speed limit placed on them!
I get that safety is important, and as a certain rival blogger loves to claim when this topic is brought up, “go speak to the Traffic Police”. However, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of bus crashes often occur with another vehicle (as is the case with road accidents involving any vehicle type). Personally, the only notable case of a bus crashing itself I can recall is the infamous 2022 Guizhou crash where a bus ferrying COVID patients lost control and flew into a ditch with more than half onboard dead, and even in that particular case the accident was chalked up to fatigued driving at 2.30am which isn’t particularly applicable to our intercity bus services that stop operating, or greatly reduce in scope, during these hours. We will have to have this conversation for night buses, but the argument that speed is the problem here is very much a moot point.
The solution, which said person fails to appreciate in almost all his writing online, reduces the chances of accidents to such miniscule levels that they would not bear significantly on the minds of prospective passengers using these services. Of course, I’m talking about our old buddy here, the dedicated bus-only lane. Contrary to LTA rhetoric, it is not only feasible, but highly desirable to afford on the Pan-Island Expressway the same level of bus priority as is currently seen on Bencoolen Street! Furthermore, given that the large majority of bus accidents occur as a result of direct collision with another vehicle (that is usually not a bus), physically separating buses on a different lane from other traffic is sufficient to eliminate the vast majority of accidents occurring, even with the buses themselves travelling at higher speeds. If express coaches can hit 100km/h in Malaysia and China without crashing unless a rogue second vehicle is involved, there is little valid safety argument against raising the speed limit here from the current highly stifling 60km/h. While we’re at that, it’s worth noting most of our newer public bus models are also built to reach double that speed with their highly powerful engines (or motors) that leave their predecessors in the dust, held back only by the mechanical speed limiter and LTA intervention to downtune them in the name of fuel efficiency.
And if the naysayers are still not assured because “it’s just paint, that doesn’t stop a car from ramming a bus”, may I gently remind that it is always possible to implement some form of physical separation of said bus lane to truly prevent foreign vehicles from causing havoc. Additionally, the very separation of lanes removes a huge risk factor that especially holds for expressways — lane filtering (that both cars and buses do), thus eliminating the possibility of a car filtering into the his lane will effectively prevent most accidents from happening. At this point, in such an insulated environment, if a bus can still get into an accident, it’s pretty much either driver error or some insane catastrophic mechanical failure that’s the cause, and these are factors that the public transport industry has a lot more control over.
When you see “intercity buses” elsewhere, headed for destinations 10km or so out of town, just remember that on the principle of Singapore being a city of cities, rather than the caricature of a single city-state, it’s worth investing in similar intercity bus schemes here too. Point-to-point, direct express intercity buses might not be the result in all cases, but the gist of it remains, even where we construct networks of rapid-stop buses to link our cities into one urban cluster. Regardless of the form said intercity buses take on, speed is a priority, and it requires a paradigm shift on the part of LTA and traffic lawmakers to recognise the value in faster public transport beyond just trains alone. We’re fundamentally an urban cluster along the lines of the Pearl River Delta, or Jingjinji, but compacted into the size of a 716 sq km island. Constructing fast, viable and attractive regional public transport shouldn’t be difficult, for the condensed scale we live in.
急行
This is the Japanese word for “Rapid” train services, denoting trains that bypass minor stations with infrastructure enabling them to overtake corresponding “Local” trains.
Since we’re at the topic of building intercity transit that works, it’s worth examining the possibility of limited-stopping on our very own MRT system, brought up from time to time. Some quarters may also refer to this practice as “express” trains instead, but they effectively do the same thing.
There’s just a few problems with this however. Firstly, note the limited benefit that limited-stopping MRT services bring about, especially when the cost of infrastructure that enables these overtakes is considered. In part, this is due to the fact that MRT lines more or less already function as rapid-stopping routes, calling once per city, thus functioning akin to our proposed rapid buses. Removing more stops from MRT lines will inevitably turn them into express services skipping towns in between, thus creating the express-route dilemma. Worse still, our rail lines intersect each other extensively in the downtown core, thus reducing the number of possible stations that a hypothetical limited-stopping train can skip. At which point, you’d have to ask yourself how much worth it is throwing entire CCL6s worth of money (S$5 billion) at modifying existing rail infrastructure just so that residents from a select few towns get to shave at most 15 minutes off their train rides. Not saying express trains are definitely a bad idea, but how many stations are there for a hypothetical express train to skip, especially if the line itself is already characterised by longer stop spacings for faster rides (cue CRL)?
Short of quad tracking entire lines (which is a big no here anyway), any other form of implementing express train services is inevitably a form of branching, albeit a virtual rather than physical branch. Nonetheless the effects are the same — local-only stations receive less service because the same track space must be shared with express trains passing through. Worse still, virtual branches are less desirable in the sense that a delay affects all services on a virtually-branched line, as opposed to physical branches where it’s possible to run truncated service on unaffected branches. It’s why alternate stopping schemes do not improve service, and neither does express services.
I’m not saying express trains cannot become part of the conversation on more robust intercity transit, but introducing them comes with limitations that hinder the overall goal of better public transport in general. Cases do exist where they’d be of actual value — for instance, the Rail Corridor converted back into a Bukit Timah Railway certainly has the space in most sections for quad tracking, or passing loops at least, and the direct connections it can offer between Woodlands, Beauty World, Bukit Merah and the CBD with mostly insignificant demand in between makes it worth operating an express train that calls at only these stops, while allowing locals to call at the rest too. A lot more consideration for the trade-offs in access has to be made when this concept is applied to other lines with much denser development around them, however.
On local stoppertrons, and why scale matters
If one were somehow bored enough to look up foreign urban bus routes on apps like Moovit and the like, they’d probably notice that trunk routes elsewhere are significantly shorter than the long trunk routes one finds here. Most, if not all of the European urban trunk bus routes are only the length of a long feeder service here! Why is that so? Again, it has got to do with our definition of a city’s scale. Local-stopping trunk services in Europe and North America tend to be confined within a single urban area, hence their short lengths. By contrast, our local stoppertrons were designed, since their introduction under SBS in the 1970s and amendments in the 1990s, to play both local-stop and intercity roles, creating a situation of these routes biting off more than they can chew, resulting in ineffective outcomes in both intended roles. Our local trunk routes, instead of being confined to a single city like the Europeans or Americans do, span multiple cities while trying to call at every stop along the way, thus their colossal runtimes, and in the lack of bus priority measures, their lack of reliability often misassociated with their route length.
The scale of an ultra-long haul local stoppertron like 961 (Woodlands – Geylang), placed in a Western context, would perhaps be like a Toronto bus route plying from Sheppard east of downtown Toronto, through the downtown and then heading towards the neighbouring “suburbs” (which are actually towns in their own right, with separate bus systems) of Kitchener and Brampton to the west, all while calling at every stop every 400m along the way. Similarly, a “trunk route” common in Western cities would be equivalent to our service 122 (Kampong Bahru – Commonwealth Stn), plying between the downtown fringe and a downtown bus terminal. Many of our long feeders, particularly network fillers aimed at patching over coverage holes in a given area, thus resemble the typical Western trunk route profile, limited to a single urban area.
There is no inconsistency at hand here — our longer stoppertron services are a reflection of our different urban structure consisting of multiple cities arranged mutually adjacent, all demanding access to each other. Is there an equivalent for these somewhere out there? Yes. These stoppertron services are akin to rural trunk buses found in many parts of China, where they ply national roads between villages and county towns, with the purpose of guaranteeing access to communities living along these roads without requiring a car. Many of these routes have countless stops akin to our long trunks, and play similarly important roles to all the communities located along them. Come to think of it, Singapore is basically that, but we’ve managed to build up the kampongs and small towns into big bustling mikrorayons much quicker than these “left-behind” parts of China.
Nonetheless as these long trunks grew longer it became obvious that these trunks wouldn’t be fit to play their intended intercity roles — they’re too slow for the job, for one. Hence we come back to the importance of having a robust rapid-stop bus network, complemented by carefully-planned expresses and direct express services, as a critical component of a strong intercity public transport network in Singapore, and highly valuable rail redundancy. It’s a combination of these, applied appropriately, that enables our buses to cover long distances without the corresponding baggage of long runtimes that passengers and bus captains alike loathe and curse. But of course, there needs to be awareness that it is intercity service we are planning for, for the mentality among LTA planners to shift in this direction.
The URA’s palette
It’s time to revisit the topic that started it all — the government project to decentralise commercial development away from the CBD alone. In a city of cities, creating regional centers serves to increase the capacity beyond that afforded by a traditional urban + suburban model, and it’s value goes just beyond providing more possible job locations for a larger population.
From the perspective of Singapore’s transport planning, the concerted effort at decentralisation is an immense opportunity to increase capacity without necessarily having to build additional infrastructure, or in some cases run more service along existing routes! By routing traffic to multiple cities scattered around the island, notably the Jurong Lake District, Punggol Digital District among others, as opposed to the last-century approach of funnelling it all to Shenton Way, the reverse-peak travel direction is more heavily utilised, alleviating congestion on the primary CBD-centric travel direction while increasing resource utilisation the other way. In the end, a service moderately-loaded in both directions carries more people than one crush-loaded in a single direction and empty in the other, at no additional operating cost.
Recognising that a Singapore-wide public transport system is of a regional, rather than municipal nature, a key priority in our public transport development in the medium term is not only for the establishment of a connective, but also a fast intercity network of speedier buses and trains. Some reform will have to be made to the remaining long trunks to balance long-corridor local coverage with bus captain welfare, but their overstretched nature in general calls for, if they serve the need (and they are) of connecting multiple cities in a “chain”, an upgrade to intercity-grade bus transit, be it rapid, express, or direct. The door for express train services, while left only a crack ajar, is still not closed, and perhaps when we do have their accessibility and frequency figured out could we make them a reality. I don’t forsee this happening for at least a decade though, however.
Evidently, when thought in terms of the North American (or European) urban-suburban model, Singapore is much too overstretched, and mistakenly conflating description with reality lands us with errors in urban planning that residents will bemoan for at least the next couple for decades. Case in point, Tengah. Judging from the URA and HDB masterplans for this upcoming large development out west, it should be an entire city in its own right, and its boundaries with adjacent cities (Choa Chu Kang, Jurong West, Bukit Batok) is also clearly marked by the arterial roads and expressways surrounding it. Unfortunately, LTA’s plans subsume Tengah as a mere suburb of Jurong, by nature of the non-existent intercity connections available. No bus service faster than a local-stopping long feeder has been planned for Tengah (and they go no further than Jurong East), and the only rail line Tengah has is a mere feeder for other main rail lines! This lack of robust intercity transit will be a deciding factor against prospective residents moving there, on top of the numerous technical fails that new technology attempted there (i.e. central cooling) has demonstrated. Not the most productive in supporting businesses in setting up shop at the demarcated commercial corner in Tengah, and it goes against the Government’s efforts towards Tengah as a key driver of decentralisation in the west on top of the JLD.
Singapore doesn’t exist on the scale of a single city surrounded by numerous suburbs. That doesn’t explain the consistent density that permeates the built environment even outside the CBD, which exists to a scale equivalent or sometimes even more than that! On our 728 sq km of territory lie instead numerous cities, condensed into the land area of individual towns, each with its own interlaced web of transport routes and nodes, interfacing with each other in ways determined by their respective network structure and complex history, if any. For the scale of a condensed urban agglomeration that Singapore truly makes up, we must plan our public transport for the service and speed that intercity transit provides.
How do we make public transport competitive enough with driving? With options that offer speed and comfort that time-tight Singaporeans value. But the political will to make this happen, especially for the “Great Speed Up campaign” that our buses need, will not appear unless our planners and politicians are cognizant of the reality that we are planning buses that are leaping across multiple cities instead of one.
A great place to start, would be to gradually make our long trunks faster by converting them to rapid stopping. And then, we would be one step closer to establishing a diamond network of direct expresses, where it would feel less like a bus, but more like an airplane or bullet train on the roads. Promising, lofty visions of a future with far faster public transport options unimaginable today. But first, mindsets must change.
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SG Transport Critic 
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