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One In Three Taxi Drivers Suffer From Driver Fatigue

While waiting in line for passengers late one night, cabbie Han Poh Guan witnessed a taxi in front slide and hit a wall as its driver had fallen asleep without pulling up the handbrake.

It is common for taxi drivers to doze off on the job because of prolonged driving without a good rest, said the 57-year-old.

Long hours and sedentary conditions are perennial complaints among taxi drivers here, many of whom work beyond the 12-hours-per-day guideline suggested by the Manpower Ministry.

A recent study among 231 cabbies here also found that one in three of them experience driver fatigue, with those who work longer hours — more than 10 hours a day — reporting a higher chance of dozing off inadvertently.

More than half, or 55 per cent, of taxi drivers surveyed said they do not take any day off.

The study — the first to look at risk factors of fatigue driving among taxi drivers here — was conducted by the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health and published in this month’s issue of the Singapore Medical Journal.

The researchers also observed that those who fall asleep at the wheel tend to report poor sleep quality, have another part-time job or consume more than three caffeinated drinks daily.

There was also a higher proportion of cabbies, relative to the adult population in Singapore, who reported chronic ailments such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus and high cholesterol.

“Effort should be made to promote a healthier lifestyle in this high-risk group, so as to curb the development of medical conditions and to prevent further complications from existing (conditions),” said the researchers, who randomly surveyed cabbies from one of the largest local companies when they were queueing to pay rental fees or waiting for their cars to be serviced.

While there are currently no official guidelines on taxi drivers’ work hours and rest periods, the researchers said their findings give cause to review existing policies and implement measures to address sleep-deprived driving, such as educating drivers to recognise when weariness creeps in.

National Taxi Association (NTA) executive adviser Ang Hin Kee said cabbies drive for long hours to cover high overheads.

The Land Transport Authority’s regulations requiring a minimum percentage of taxis to undertake a daily mileage of at least 250km also contribute to cabbies’ daily grind, he added.

However, more has been done in recent years to care for the health of taxi drivers, Mr Ang said. For instance, the NTA has worked with the Health Promotion Board since late 2012 to bring free health screenings and workshops to cabbies, while also offering them stretch bands and pedometers.

The association also organises weekly jogging and bowling exercises during off-peak hours to “get cabbies on their feet”, although drivers have been slow to take it up, Mr Ang said.

He expects the introduction of third-party taxi applications and a widened pool of relief drivers to give cabbies some relief.

Taxi drivers whom TODAY spoke to said they have to work long hours to make ends meet.

“Rent and fuel costs can go up to S$190 a day and I have to take up to 30 trips to see net income growth,” said Mr Han, who drives from 6pm to 6am every day.

While he tries to get at least eight hours of sleep daily, this is often affected by the time he reserves for his family. “I have no time and money to exercise or go for check-ups,” said the ComfortDelGro driver.

Some, including Mr Kelvin Lim, still set aside time to work out. The 53-year-old TransCab driver dedicates three hours in between two driving shifts to playing basketball with his colleagues and neighbours.

“I make a very conscious effort to maintain a healthy lifestyle. This is a very high-risk job, so it is important to take care of ourselves,” Mr Lim said.

Source: www.todayonline.com

February 25, 2015
What Will It Take For Singaporeans To Give Up Cars

Many foreigners are baffled as to why a Singaporean would want to buy a car, paying several times the price of a car in their own home countries. After all, they insist, the MRT system is fantastic and so much better than the subway in New York or the Tube in London. Others argue that car ownership takes on an aspirational veneer in Singapore, and people are willing to pay a lot of money to realise the dream.

However, as any Singaporean knows, public transport can only get you so far if you don’t live near an MRT station and don’t go out after midnight. In order to really change Singaporeans’ attitude to car ownership, some changes need to happen first, like the following.

Increased accessibility to public transport

The occasional breakdown and daily shoving matches not withstanding, the MRT is fairly efficient. While it pales in comparison to its counterparts in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Taipei, it does offer the quickest way to get from Jurong East MRT station to Bugis MRT station, especially considering the jams on the road.

But the problem is that most Singaporeans live in suburban areas quite a distance from the central zone, and unless you actually live within wallking distance of Jurong East MRT in the above example, getting to the station can be a big headache in itself. I can’t pretend I’m not just a little bitter about this, as I live in an area with only one bus, which has taken up to 1 hour to arrive in the past.

When you think about all that lost time spent waiting for the bus in order to get to the MRT station, it’s not hard to see why many Singaporeans don’t mind shelling out the cash to buy a car. Either driving to work or using the park and ride scheme to get to an MRT station can save you more than an hour each day—a life saver if you have to work long hours.

Cheaper late night transport options

While raising the prices of cars can deter people from buying them, those who routinely travel after midnight save much less, which then increases the attractiveness of having your own transport. Taxi fares in Singapore have risen quite a bit over the last ten years, and taking a 30 minute cab ride after midnight can easily cost you more than $25.

If you go out for late night suppers a lot, get the urge to shop at Mustafa at 3am or work the graveyard shift but have a meagre transport allowance, getting a car makes a lot of sense. While we do have NightRider and Night Owl bus services, these are limited and operate only only Fridays and Saturdays and the eve of public holidays, presumably to cater to partygoers.

I personally think the NightRider services are great, and if they could be extended to the other days of the week and serve a wider range of areas, going out at night would be a lot more affordable, considering the cost of two beers and a cab ride home with midnight surcharge could easily set you back $50.

More independence and free time for kids

Many Singaporeans I’ve spoken to seem to be of the opinion that a car becomes a necessity when you have kids. However, unless you ferry your kids around every single day, the odd taxi ride to the zoo or the clinic would probably still cost much less than a car.

The problem is that many Singaporeans actually do ferry their kids around every single day. I live just outside a primary school, and every morning and afternoon the road gets jameed by an insane number of parental cars just waiting to drop their offspring off at the school gates. Many parents prefer to get stuck in a neverending queue of parents’ cars than to drop their kids off a 5 minute walk away.

Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world and actually the perfect place for kids to learn how to use public transport on their own, since there’s little fear of their being kidnapped and sold as slaves.

On the other hand, very often it’s not that kids aren’t able to take public transport on their own—but rather that they have too many after school activities. Parents need cars so they can drive frantically from tuition centres to piano lessons to Young Genius seminars.

If kids are allowed to be independent and free up enough time in their schedule to remove the need for parents to become chauffeurs, more people might realise that it is indeed possible to parent without a car.

Greater comfort on public transport

If you’ve ever had a migraine, been pregnant or just damned tired after another 12 hour work day, you’ve probably sworn that you would either quit your job or buy a car. For many people, their biggest bugbear about having to rely on public transport isn’t commuting time—it’s comfort level.

To be fair, the MRT and buses in Singapore are actually quite comfortable on their own. Nobody’s asking for velvet cushions or free foot massages during their commute. But when the trains and buses are packed to bursting point, you have to stand throughout an hour-long commute and you’ve got armpits in your face and heels stabbing at your feet, a car looks that much more appealing.

Unfortunately, even if SMRT started being more generous about the air con on the trains and hiring smiling greeters to wish passengers a pleasant commute, the crux of the matter is that for those with a long commute, standing for an hour or more causes enough discomfort to send them running to car dealers. When you’re already exhausted from work, trying to balance on the steps of an overcrowded bus or having to grab for the poles as the driver makes yet another emergency stop can take its toll.

With office decentralisation already starting to happen and the government making efforts to improve the capacity of the public transport infrastructure, let’s hope this problem gets solved someday.

Do you have a car and why did you buy one despite the high cost? Share your reasons in the comments!

Source:http://blog.moneysmart.sg

February 25, 2015
Standard & Poor Provides Singapore Unsolicited AAA Rating

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services said today that Singapore’s 2015 budget continues to show the strength of the government’s institutional and governance effectiveness. This factor is a key support for their sovereign credit rating on Singapore (unsolicited ratings AAA/Stable/A-1+; axAAA/axA-1+).

“The Singapore budget focuses on longer-term fiscal challenges even as it addresses the immediate capacity constraints in transport and health services, areas that will see significant increases in spending,” said Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Yee Farn Phua.

Policies announced in the Singapore dollar S$68.2 billion budget aim to boost the country’s economic growth potential, retrain Singaporean workers, and ensure increased funding to meet the needs of Singapore’s aging population. Investments in these areas significantly outsize the S$705 million transfers to households. These measures should help maintain Singapore’s credit strengths even as the population ages at one of the fastest rates in Asia.

After accounting for revenue not reported as part of the Singapore budget, S&P estimates that the general government account will remain in surplus over the fiscal years ending March 2015 and March 2016. The government projects a budget deficit of S$6.7 billion (1.7 per cent of GDP) in the fiscal year ending March 2016 after a nearly balanced budget in the current fiscal year.

Source: www.businesstimes.com.sg

February 25, 2015
Japan’s Crown Prince Warns On ‘Correct’ History

Japan’s crown prince has warned of the need to remember World War II “correctly”, in a rare foray into an ideological debate as nationalist politicians seek to downplay the country’s historic crimes.

In an unusual intervention in the discussion, Naruhito’s mild-mannered broadside was being interpreted in some circles as a rebuke to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a key figure in the right-wing drive to minimise the institutionalised system of wartime sex slavery.

“Today when memories of war are set to fade, I reckon it is important to look back our past with modesty and pass down correctly the miserable experience and the historic path Japan took from the generation who know the war to the generation who don’t,” Naruhito said.

The comments, released Monday on the prince’s 55th birthday come as Abe’s controversial views on history roil relations with China and South Korea, and cause unease in Washington.

Abe has openly said he wants a more sympathetic telling of the history of the first half of the 20th century, a period marked by brutal expansionism in Asia and warring with China and the West.

The prime minister last week appointed a 16-member panel to advise him on a statement he is set to make later this year to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender.

Abe has said he will largely stand by Tokyo’s previous apologies, but amid growing anger in China and South Korea over the “comfort women” system, speculation is mounting that he will seek to downplay the issue.

Mainstream historians agree that up to 200,000 women, predominantly from Korea, were forced into sexual slavery during WWII.

Right wing Japanese insist there is no documentary proof that the Japanese state or its military were involved in the system on the Korean peninsula and reject official guilt. That position, which is hardening, angers South Korea and China.

Both countries will be carefully watching any official pronouncement on the war.

While Japan’s newspapers remained staid in their coverage of Naruhito’s comments, social media users leapt on them.

“This definitely contains a warning against Shinzo Abe, doesn’t it?” tweeted @Kirokuro.

“It is a regular recognition (of history), but these comments by the crown prince stand out because Prime Minister Abe’s views on the constitution and history are outrageous,” said @kazu_w50

Asked about his views on war and peace, Naruhito told reporters: “It was very painful that many precious lives were lost, many people suffered and felt deep sorrow in the world including in Japan.”

“It is important that we never forget people who died in the war… (and we must) deepen our appreciation for our past so as not to repeat the horrors of war and to foster a love of peace,” he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com

February 24, 2015
America’s Freelance IS Killers

The Kurds fighting the so-called Islamic State are attracting combatants from all over the world. Some head into battle out of conviction. Others want to make a buck.

DAQUQ, Iraq — The so-called Islamic State has recruited copious cannon fodder from around the world, along with quite a few ferocious fighters. But its toughest opponents on the ground, the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, are attracting Western ex-soldiers for their ranks who are determined to see the self-proclaimed “caliphate” not only “degraded,” as Washington puts it, but destroyed.

At a Kurdish Peshmerga base on the fluid battle lines outside the ethnically and religiously mixed Iraqi city of Kirkuk, three American fighters sat down with The Daily Beast. We were less than half a mile from the black flags of ISIS, as the would-be Islamic State is widely known, and the soldiers asked that I not give too many details about their identities. They worry that their families could become special targets for a fanatical fighting force whose battlefields, like its targets, seem limitless.

Dressed in a Peshmerga uniform, Jeremy is a compact, affable 28-year-old-guy from Mississippi who fought with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s been fighting alongside the Pesh for the last six months.

Leo is a tall and direct 38-year-old Texan who worked security for private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mel’s background also is in military security contracting and he says he served for a while with an army from a European country, but he won’t specify which. Mel’s a little eccentric. At 41, the Colorado native sports a pair of carefully pointed canine teeth—fangs, in fact— and a goatee that gives off a strong goth-metal vibe.

For two months Leo and Mel have been with the Peshmerga, the erstwhile guerrilla army that now makes up the autonomous armed forces of Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, and both are dressed in the gray flannel shirts and cargo pants often associated with private security contractors, but they and Jeremy all claim to be volunteers who are not receiving any kind of salary.

As we sit in the comfortable field office of Peshmerga Maj. Gen. Karwan Asaad, with Kurdish TV playing on a flat screen in the background, the hazy battle lines feel bizarrely distant despite a network of frontline dugouts only a few hundred yards away. But the Americans are anything but complacent.

Brett, a 28-year-old U.S. national who fights jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group alongside Dwekh Nawsha, a Christian militia whose name is an Assyrian-language phrase conveying self-sacrifice, poses for a photograph on February 5, 2015, in the northern Iraqi town of Al-Qosh, located 35 km north of Mosul. (Safin Hamed/Getty)

“ISIS are tough, real tough,” Jeremy says with his Mississippi twang. With fog settling in, he says it’s prime conditions for ISIS to make a move. It’s a different kind of warfare from what he saw when he was with the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He sees ISIS not so much as an insurgency as an invasion force. “It’s very different fighting a group that’s trying to take over,” he says.

The three men say their main assignments are guarding high-ranking Kurdish military officials and transporting jihadist prisoners in Peshmerga custody. It’s work Mel and Leo became well accustomed to when hired as contractors in earlier American wars. Here, Mel says he’s transported ISIS prisoners that come from Chechnya, Ireland, France, Germany, the UK, The U.S. and Canada, but maintains he is barred from speaking with them and has no idea what happens once they are handed over to Kurdish guards.

The three say, without specifics, they have received U.S. assurances they won’t be prosecuted when returning home, but that to be sure requires dealing with a lot of government clearances and maintaining a low profile. According to Jeremy, a lot of his ex-Army buddies are itching to get to Iraq and join the anti-ISIS fight, but he says many have been blocked because they make those plans public on social media.

The three say they have no interest in internal Kurdish politics and that even their sympathies for the Kurdish national struggle are secondary to their goal of contributing to the defeat of ISIS. They doubt the capabilities or commitment of the Iraqi Army and see the Kurds as the first defense against the spread of an American enemy.

Leo believes that if ISIS isn’t defeated, he could end up fighting its militants on battlefields around the world, and he is seriously disappointed in the way the Obama administration has handled the rise of the would-be caliphate. He says the failure of U.S. policy is a central reason he felt the need to join the Pesh.

Jeremy says he was uncomfortable sitting at home and watching the news of ISIS beheadings, mass killings and enslavements and felt obligated to use his military training and skills to support those fighting the jihadists.

For Mel, it was a matter of feeling disheartened by the large numbers of foreigners joining ISIS. He became convinced he had to join the Kurds.

Source: www.thedailybeast.com

February 24, 2015