Transport Minister sees a need to step up train maintenance

A lot more needs to be done to improve the maintenance regime of Singapore's train system, Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew said. But this should not translate into shutting down the system during operating hours to get the work done, he said in an interview with The Straits Times.

Asked if increased maintenance would mean more halts to services during operating hours, as operators have complained they have only a small window every night to complete maintenance, Mr. Lui said, "I don't necessarily agree that they must have more prolonged shutdowns of the system in order to be able to do what must be done."

The way to intensify the maintenance is through a proper allocation of manpower resources and better use of technology, he said. Pointing to Hong Kong's MTR system, to which the Singapore system is often compared, Mr. Lui said it is run as intensively as Singapore's and yet, during their graveyard shift, there is a 'massive mobilisation' effort. "We are not yet at that level," he said.

Asked if the MRT's reliability problems were due to maintenance or design and infrastructure problems, Mr. Lui said he did not want to apportion blame to either. But he noted design problems tend to crop up within three to five years of the opening of a line.

He noted that while reliability has had a mixed report card, much has been done to solve the two other pet peeves of commuters: capacity and congestion. In the last four years, train capacity has gone up by almost 30 percent and headways - the time between trains arriving - is now within five minutes for the major lines, except during the early morning. Also, about 750 new buses will be on the roads by the year end, with another 250 by 2017.