Tag Archives: breakdown

Any fine paid by SMRT goes effectively from one Government pocket to another, or as one person put it, from the pants pocket to the shirt pocket, so does not hurt the people ultimately responsible for the breakdown. A far better way of compensating the much put-upon commuter is by forcing SMRT to allow free public transport for a number of days. As Singaporeans have paid for their network through higher taxes and more austerity, the free travel should only be extended to those holding pink ICs and their immediate family.

In 2011, MRT breakdown was 1 per 700 trips. After 3 years of diligent engineering effort by team, now its 1 per 2000 trips.Today, trains have 1 breakdown after 6 years running. (Me: I was surprised cos my car breaks down more often than that!!) In other words, events this week is an anomaly not norm. Things have really improved.

The amount that SMRT may be fined for the massive MRT breakdown on Tuesday may be closer to 1 to 2 million Singapore dollars, as opposed to the exaggerated $50 million reported by most news agencies.

It is of great concern that train troubles continue to plague Singapore, the latest one coming after a recent fare increase (“2 major MRT lines down for over 2 hours”; yesterday, and “Bus and train fares to increase from April”; Feb 2). Even more astounding than the massive train breakdown however, is how, after so many incidents, recovery on the part of SMRT leaves much to be desired.

Despite this, there’s an important company here whose head office is thoroughly drab and unremarkable. Without keeping an eye out, passersby wouldn’t even realize that this building right at the junction of North Bridge Road is the SMRT headquarters! It doesn’t take long to see that the building’s design and colour scheme are pretty dull. The building’s main entrance is also difficult to find, and most people use the vehicle entrance or pedestrian entrance instead.

WP takes care of AHPETC well except they went overbudget, how much is it going to cost to rectify the problems in our MRT issue? I'm sure more than what WP overbudget ;)

LTA issued a statement yesterday (9 Jul) giving an update of their investigations into the cause of the massive train disruptions on Tuesday evening (7 Jul). The disruptions affected some 250,000 commuters at all 54 MRT stations on both the North-South Line and East-West Line, with many commuters taking their frustrations online, scolding SMRT – which runs both lines – and Desmond Kuek its CEO (‘Massive disruptions on 2 main MRT lines‘).

One School of Thought will SAY - Aiyoh, let be FAIR to DESMOND leh, he inherited the problem. BUT I say..sure he inherited the problem, since he took OVER hasn't he been "trumpeting" how much reliability has improved and didn't he GET amply rewarded for this, didnt his payout rise from S$1million+ to $2million+ over a space of 3 years or so?

Any Engineer worth his salt would know that Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is the average length of time between failures. Kuek is striving to "shorten" MTBF, meaning SMRT is working towards more failures (breakdowns) and not "enhancing lives".

The CEOs of LTA and train operator SMRT are spoke at a press conference at 11am on Wednesday morning after a 3.5-hour disruption crippled the North-South and East-West Lines (NSEWL). We are not 100 per cent sure on the root cause... We have an idea of where to check. We'll look through the data and find the root cause.