I was very angry when I read the news that the Land Transport Authority (LTA) has awarded a tender of $68 million for an intelligent bus management system. Link. The benefit to consumers is described in this sentence, " With more accurate bus arrival information, commuters can better plan their journeys and travel options."
There are 3,500 buses in operation in Singapore. The budget of $68 million works out to $20,000 per bus. This is a lot of money.
Our buses are already equipment with GPS and other electronic devices. Why do we have to spend another $20,000 per bus to replace the existing equipments and introduce a new "intelligent system"?
The budget of $68 million is what the LTA will spend. I presume that this will not include the cost that the bus operators will have to spend to train their bus drivers and employees on the use of the new system.
Commuters can already get the information on bus arrival times from the "MyTransport" app provided by the LTA. They do not need the new $68 million "intelligent system" to get this information. It will be more useful if the current information is provided to other app developers, so that consumers can get the information in a more friendly and useful way, rather than be restricted to the LTA app.
The new projects will also provide "a unified solution for operations control, fleet management, passenger information and business management for the LTA and the two public transport operators." I read comments that this meant that the bus operators can despatch additional buses where they are needed on a real time basis.
This sounds great in theory, but how is this put into operation? To send out additional buses, you need to have the vehicles and drivers on standby, who are familiar with the route. Do we have these spare resources?
What about congested roads? How will putting additional buses help to improve the bus service when the roads are clogged up?
We do not need a real time data for planning of our bus routes. The current data already allows the LTA and bus operators to study the demand for various bus services at various times of the day. If the data is analzyed, it can be used to better manage the bus routes and deployment. While there is value in using real time data for intelligent deployment of the buses, I suspect that the real value is questionable, and certainly would not justify the expenditure of $68 million.
If real time data on congested buses is really useful, there are more economic ways to provide this information, using the smart phones of bus drivers and commuters and the Internet.
On 9 April, the bus operators implemented the increase in public transport fares of 2 to 5%. The cost to commuter is $53 million a year. There were calls by commuters to defer this increase, but it was largely ignored. Instead, $68 million is noew being spent on a project of questionable benefit.
I started this article with the expression "I was angry". I was not shocked or surprised, because the habit of spending large sums of money on a wasteful manner is now quite common among our government agencies in Singapore. It is now part of our culture.
Tan Kin Lian
*Article first appeared on http://c-onyx.com/page/1817