Pkchukiss – Reality Wine

It has been touted to be the south-east asia’s first fully automated rapid transit. What the world doesn’t know is that it is also bloody expensive to construct and run, and that it also breaks down quite a lot.

Of course, I’m talking about the North-east line.

It broke down on the first day of operation, and then multiple times throughout its years of service. Interestingly, it would almost always be a different problem each time the system breaks down, but the end result is always the same: the staff stationed on the train proper has to open the compartment of manual controls, and over-ride the automatic system.

In short, they end up driving the train themselves.

How do I know? The train accelerates and decelerates irregularly, and slams to a stop at the odd station, while for most of the journey, the train stops behind the actual alignment with the platform doors, and has to inch forward bit by bit to match the screen doors. Other times, the train overshoots the stop line, and has to be reversed. Unlike the carefully math-controlled acceleration and deceleration, a human driving a train shows up like a light bulb in a dark room.

To give credit to SBSTransit, they’ve done a remarkable job of keeping the trains running, for a line that breaks down so often. But it’s like taking consolation in the grand scheme of bad things: it defeats the purpose of making the MRT line driverless if you’re going to employ people to stand inside the train to be ready to drive the train when it breaks down. And since lower labour costs was one of the original argument put forward for investing in the huge cost of automating the line, I feel cheated.

Just imagine how much lower the cost of the line would have been if it had been built as per the usual MRT lines? Less breakdown means less workhours lost, and thus lower economic damages. Labour costs would remain the same, since the employees standing around on the train would instead be inside the driver’s cabin. And the upfront investment would have been a lot less.

Of course, it is easy for me to criticise with the clarity of hindsight, but being made to be guinea pigs to a new, unproven system is a lot of unneeded expenditure, and brings a lot of inconvenience. I hope that the government has learnt its lesson. Public transportation in Singapore is a key infrastructure, using it to test unproven technology is going to bring a lot of problems for the commuters. That just isn’t worth the bragging rights for being first.

Filed under: General