Tag: SMRT

Singaporeans Shoud Stop Complaining And Spare A Thought For SMRT Workers And Their Families!

We were having family dinner when my dad received notification that he is activated. Without further ado, he put down his dinner and report within 30 minutes to the assigned station. He did not grumble about how he had to work again. The previous time when he was activated, he came back to us and shared with us how he could understand the feelings of the passengers who were shouting and pushing him and his coworkers. He stood and said sorry at least 100 times to everyone who was trapped. He is just a maintenance guy in SMRT.

But, there was no negativity in him despite being shouted at, at the efficiency of the company, at the long standing hours or at anything. He came back to announce that he was glad that it’s settled.

So, before we throw our frustrations and ill mannerism to any of the ground staff, please remember that they are just doing their best to get lives moving. They apologized on behalf of SMRT, not themselves. And most importantly, they have families waiting for them back home, or the unfinished dinner to eat too. A little empathy goes a long way to consider the various stakeholders invoked in this whole process. And I am sure we can do this!

And for now, my family and I are waiting for my dad to come home safely.

Source: Iris Lee

July 9, 2015
SMRT Fiasco – Time For Heads To Roll

To call it a disaster may be an understatement for the quarter of a million people stranded by the train breakdowns last evening. Yes, we do see breakdown pretty often but what happened last night was unprecedented. 250,000 commuters were affected when no less than 57 train stations were rendered obsolete.

Some scenes of the fiasco last night

The scenes around the red dot last night were befitting of an apocalyptic blockbuster. Bus stops became obsolete, queues formed were so long that it gave the queues at Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral a good run for its money and people were lost, angry and unsatisfied, to say the least.

Bus stops became a thing of the past (Source: Renald Loh)

On social media, many Singaporeans lamented about how, in the face of constant breakdowns and now the nationwide disaster, unjustified the increases in the salaries of CEOs and fares were. In the past 5 years alone, commuters have seen fares increased 3 times.

To add salt to the wound, just last week SMRT CEO’s Desmond Kuek’s salary increased yet again. His salary has increased mulitfold in just a span of three years and he is now paid at least 2.2 million annually. With increases in salaries of the men in-charge and fare hikes, it is only natural that commuters expect a parallel increase in service standards, or at the very least, the maintenance of current standards.

However, that was not to be. The lack of satisfaction amongst millions of Singaporeans is justified, definitely more justified than the fare hikes and Desmond Kuek’s remuneration package.

SMRT CEO Desmond Kuek

Instead of taking responsibility and being seen on the ground to ensure commuters affected by the countless breakdowns get home safely, there was little else other than statements of ‘concern.’ from Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew. From a layman’s perspective, stranded at bus stops and faced with the never ending queue in the hot, humid and sweltering crowd, reflecting on the astronomical salaries the people behind the trains and the fare hikes is a real kick in the face.

Even if we can accept occasional breakdown, or even systemic infrastructural faults, complete lack of accountability should not be tolerated. And we saw a decent dose of that last night.

But things weren’t always like that, were they? There was once a time where the MRT was the pride of all Singaporeans alike and breakdowns were as alien as curry puff syndicates . So much so, in fact, that the PAP itself incorporated the MRT in it’s election posters.

A PAP campaign poster from 1998.

Now, that is one poster we’ll probably never see revived. Not with the way things are going. This poster surfaced in 1988, when the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew was our Prime Minister. Reflecting on last night’s fiasco, I can’t help but wonder, what would he have done?

I for one feel that, if the man was still around, such an incident wouldn’t even have happened. In fact, he would have tackled the problem at its core before it snowballed to the constant breakdowns Singaporean commuters face today. See, if there were one thing that separated PAP’s Lee Kuan Yew from the PAP of today, it would boil down to this – he never hesitated to make heads roll.

Let us cast our minds back to Mr Lee’s National Day Rally in 1984,

“Everything works, whether its water, electricity, gas, telephone, telexes, it just has to work. If it doesn’t work, I want to know why, and if I am not satisfied, and I often was not, the chief goes, and I have to find another chief. Firing the chief is very simple.”

Mr Lee and Mdm Kwa entering the train station

To cut the long story short, if Mr Lee was in charge, heads will roll. Mr Kuek and Mr Lui would be lucky to even stay in their positions, let alone collect millions of dollars. The PAP of the past sure is a far cry from what it is today.

As then Chief District Judge Tan Siong Thye during the Committee of Inquiry on the slate of breakdowns concluded:

That the incidents were preventable and that there was a “a gaping disconnect between what was formally on record and what was happening on the ground”.

And that gap is ever-widening. The PAP of today is great for soundbites, but when it actually comes to acting on their words – well, I’ll leave you to decide for yourself.

It’s about time that Singaporeans started voicing out for, as Mr Lee said, heads to roll. And the ballot box is a pretty good place to start.

Source: www.theonlinecitizen.com

July 9, 2015
Gerald Giam: Caught In The NSEW Line Breakdown

I was caught in the massive breakdown of the North-South and East-West Line (NSEWL) of the MRT yesterday evening as I was heading to a meeting at the WP HQ in Jalan Besar. When I reached Dover station at about 7.05pm, the eastbound train was already at the platform but with all its cabin lights off. I got onto the train anyway, but waited almost 5 minutes before it finally moved off. The westbound train on the opposite track was similarly stalled. My train stopped midway to the next station and all its lights went out again. This pattern was to repeat itself several more times over the next 25 minutes. When I reached Outram Park station at about 7.35pm, the lights in the train went out a final time and we were told to detrain as it was no longer in service.

The PA system announcements at the station informed us that train service on the entire NSEWL had been suspended and free shuttle buses were available. So I exited the station thinking I could hop onto one of the buses. Big mistake! The street level was packed with people and there were no buses to be seen and no directional signs to guide the stranded commuters. Someone asked me where the buses were. I told him honestly that I had no idea.

Knowing that it would be pointless to attempt taking a cab, I headed back down to the station, against the flow of the crowd, hoping to get in again and take the North-East Line (NEL). But all the fare gates were closed and I was told by an SMRT staff that I had to exit and walk around the station to get into the NEL entrance. I finally boarded the NEL and arrived at my meeting almost half an hour late.

I consider myself fortunate that I was able to hop onto the NEL. The guy sitting next to me on the East-West Line train (before it stopped at Outram) said that he was heading to his home in Simei. I think he, like hundreds of thousands of other commuters, probably got home much later than usual.

This 3.5 hour service disruption, which happened simultaneously on the two busiest MRT lines during the Tuesday evening rush hour, was probably the most serious service disruption ever. I had flashbacks to November 2011, when I had another close shave — I just missed getting on one of the trains from City Hall station that was to eventually stall in the middle of the tunnel.

According to SMRT and LTA, the outage was due to a power fault. Preliminary investigations found that a faulty train could have caused the power to trip. I find it astonishing that a fault with a single train could cause power to be cut to trains at all 58 stations on the NSEWL. Is there so little redundancy in the system? Or are all the circuits strung together in series like a cheap set of Christmas tree lights?

As of the time of this writing, it is still unclear if the MRT service will be available in time for the Wednesday morning rush hour. SMRT has already advised commuters to make alternative travel plans. Both the Minister for Transport and LTA have come out to apologise for the breakdown and demanded that the faults be investigated and rectified. That is little comfort for the quarter-of-a-million or so commuters who suffered this massive inconvenience and frustration.

The Commission of Inquiry (COI) into the November 2011 MRT disruptions had identified maintenance (or lack thereof) as a key cause of the multiple breakdowns then. Now, almost 4 years later, with a new CEO at the helm who promised to focus more on engineering and maintenance capabilities, we seem to be back to square one. What can we expect moving forward? Another COI?

Source: http://geraldgiam.sg

July 9, 2015
Root Cause Not Found, Lee Hsien Loong ‘Very Concerned’

While an overnight sweep of the North-South and East-West lines turned up several faults including damaged power cables and water leakage, the authorities and train operator SMRT were still none the wiser about the root cause of yesterday’s (July 7) unprecedented breakdown — prompting Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to express his concern that the problem, which brought the two lines to a complete halt and left about 250,000 commuters stranded across the island, could flare up again.

Mr Lee noted that Land Transport Authority and SMRT staff worked overnight to check the trains, tracks and cables and the trains resumed full service throughout today without a glitch. “But because we have not identified the root cause of the power trips, we are still very worried that the problem may recur,” Mr Lee wrote on Facebook.

Mr Lee said he was “very concerned” about the breakdown and was briefed about the situation at the LTA Operations Centre today. “We are still trying to find out the cause of the problem… Hope we identify and resolve the faults quickly, to prevent further inconvenience to commuters.”

Earlier, the LTA and SMRT held a press conference where SMRT Trains managing director Lee Ling Wee said that overnight checks identified two damaged power cables along the North-South line near Bishan MRT station, a faulty relay system at Kranji’s power substation, and a water leakage close to the third-rail insulator at Tanjong Pagar station.

While these problems had been rectified, they did not provide a conclusive picture of what could have caused the multiple power trips, which intensified and forced SMRT to shut down the lines — which made up the bulk of the Republic’s MRT network and ran through 54 stations.

The problem, which was quite unlike anything SMRT had dealt with before, was baffling its experts. “We are not 100 per cent sure on the root cause,” he said. He noted that it could be a combination or any of several factors such as from train and track conditions, train frequency, and the amount of moisture on the tracks.

There are protective relay systems installed in power substations along the North-South and East-West lines, which are activated when voltage between the running rail and electrical earth surges beyond a safe limit. The fact that the running rail is connected across both lines complicates investigations, he said. “So it is very hard for us to isolate exactly where this breakdown in insulation was …(But) if we don’t do it, it will happen in different parts of the network, it is unpredictable, it is random, depending on how many train runs in the system. Where there are more trains, the chances of it happening is higher,” he said.

Train services ground to a halt at 7.15pm yesterday. The first signs of trouble surfaced more than an hour earlier, when SMRT detected multiple power trips. These were initially rectified but the power trips intensified in frequency and impact, and eventually caused nine trains to stall between stations. SMRT managed to get these trains moving again to the nearest stations before it shut down the system.

Working through the night, engineers checked the trains, tracks and power systems for anomalies such as burn marks, dislodged and dangling cables. Preliminary investigation initially narrowed the problem to a a faulty train but it was later found to be normal.

Mr Lee Ling Wee said the glitches discovered during the overnight checks were not identified during routine maintenance checks, which are conducted every six months, with more comprehensive checks carried out once a year.

“Our routine checks do cover these (components) but … it’s not like (checks are done) every day … so you can expect in an ageing system, some of these may fail in between the intervals,” he said. “There (was) no reason for us to suspect that these things will fail, because all regular maintenance checks have not uncovered such issues in the past.”

Nevertheless, he said that SMRT may increase the frequency of the checks and look into installing monitoring devices that can spot faults on a real-time basis. With 45 more trains to be added to the North-South and East-West lines after the completion of sleeper replacement and re-signalling work, SMRT will engage external consultants to assess the lines’ power capacity and robustness “with more urgency” following the breakdown, he added. LTA chief executive Chew Men Leong said a new voltage-limiting device has been piloted for Downtown Line 1, which can isolate power trips.

Transport experts whom TODAY spoke to called on SMRT to step up its maintenance regime, including by tapping technology.

SIM University transport analyst Park Byung Joon said that real-time sensors may help nip glitches in the bud. “Since it is not physically possible to expand maintenance hours, it is time to think about more expensive investments to enhance the maintenance schedule,” he said.

National University of Singapore engineering professor Lee Der-Horng added: “Perhaps (SMRT) should shorten the intervals between routine checks. I would have thought that SMRT would have accumulated enough experience and data to determine an optimal maintenance regime.”

At the press conference, both Mr Chew and SMRT chief executive Desmond Kuek apologised again to affected commuters. Mr Kuek said: “(The incident) is a stark reminder that the journey to bringing about a higher order of reliability and assurance is a difficult one … but we are committed to it.”

Source: www.todayonline.com

July 9, 2015
SMRT Launches New Training Centre For Bus Drivers

Twelve simulators have been set up at a new training centre for bus drivers, to give trainees a real sense of what happens on the roads – before they get behind the wheel.

Jointly set-up by SMRT and the Devan Nair Institute for Employment and Employability (e2i), the Bus Training and Evaluation Centre (BTEC) opened its doors on Thursday after nearly a year of planning.

The 6,300 sq ft space currently houses four full-cabin simulators that replicate the look and feel of a driver’s cabin – complete with rear-view mirrors, steering wheel and instrument panels. The other eight simulators can be used for more basic training such as route familiarisation.

“We designed this place with the intention for the entire industry to come here for this training,” said SMRT vice-president for buses Tan Kian Heong.

According to e2i, Tower Transit – the London-based operator that won the first bus-contracting tender in May – had already expressed interest.

SMRT’s new training centre has room for four more full-cabin simulators, which both the operator and e2i said would be added within a year. These four have not been built partly because it is still unknown what model of buses the new operators would bring in.

Together, the 16 simulators will cost about $20 million, said Mr Tan, adding that it would reduce the time new drivers spent familiarising themselves with routes on the road – a time-consuming and tedious process.

“The 16 simulators networked together, allow not just for individual training, but team-based learning and training,” added Mr Tan.

Senior Minister of State for transport Josephine Teo, who was at the centre’s opening, said there are merits in consolidating training resources for the bus industry.

She added that the Public Transport Tripartite Committee is in talks to “bring about greater alignment of our training efforts” in future. “We have agreed to take the next few months to flesh out the ideas to take things forward,” she said.

Separately, SBS Transit said in a statement on Thursday that it will install another 21 sets of its own bus driver training system at the company’s development centre in Hougang within the year.

Since 2006 till now, it has invested more than $1.2 million in its Vigil and Mobileye training systems. The former uses technology to analyse bus drivers while they are on the move and generates a report of their performance at the end of each session, while the later is a smart camera that alerts drivers if they are at risk of colliding with another object.

Senior bus captain Teng Hwee Cheong, 54, who has been driving SBS Transit buses for the past 12 years, said: “I am able to improve on my driving as Vigil is able to detect the smoothness of my ride whether I am braking too hard or accelerating too quickly. It has also helped me to be more conscious of the important need to check my blind spots.”

Meanwhile, all of SMRT’s 2,500 drivers will come to its centre for two to three days of training over the next year.

They will learn to work in a team-environment together with service controllers based in operations centres.

The simulator system has been programmed with more than 1,000 scenarios, which instructors can throw at trainees.

For instance, a car could be programmed to stop in front of a bus stop, or the instructor could trigger cyclists or pedestrians to dash out.

This training can be “customised to individual needs”, said Mr Tan.

Bus captain Amy Tan, who has been with SMRT for five years, said the simulator system was an excellent way for new drivers to get acquainted with their routes.

“On the road it can be dangerous for new drivers. Here you can learn without endangering pedestrians or passengers,” said Madam Tan, 49.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

July 3, 2015