Survey Shows Commuters in S’pore Think Public Transport Has Improved in 2018

By
George Yang
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Now, before you prepare all your rotten eggs and aim towards me (why shoot the messenger?), hold your horses.

We all know that most of us only remember things that pissed us off: for example, girls never remember the things that their bae has done for them, but always remember what their bae hasn’t done.

It’s human nature, so if you feel that public transport has become worse, maybe you should think more objectively.

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There’s a Wikipedia page that lists down all the MRT breakdowns, so let’s take a look at that and—

Image: Wikipedia

—wait, that page is gone?

I’ll suggest that you download our app if you haven’t done so because we’re going to talk about that in another article. And don’t rely on Facebook to show the article to you: Facebook cares more about moolah so you’d most like see videos (with ads) or simply ads on your newsfeed.

Okay, without that Wikipedia page, let’s look at a survey done in October last year.

Survey Shows Singapore Commuters Feel That Public Transport Is the Best in 10 Years

Every year since 2006, the Public Transport Council (PTC) commissions an independent market research consultant to conduct a survey to understand commuters’ expectations and needs, as well as to identify areas for improvement.

This year’s findings are surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) promising.

Conducted by Nexus Link Pte Ltd (no, it’s not related to the good old Google phone) that surveyed 5,000 commuters during peak and off-peak hours, it shows an increase in commuters’ satisfaction.

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Here’s a breakdown of the results.

Commuters’ Overall Satisfaction

Image: diyben / Shutterstock.com

So, for the overall satisfaction, how does the entire public transport network fare?

In 2014, the mean satisfaction score is at 7.1 out of 10. In 2018, it has jumped to 7.9.

Image: ptc.gov.sg

Of course, what’s interesting is that there has been a general increase in the satisfaction score in the last few years. By 2030, maybe it’ll be 10/10?

MRT Satisfaction score

Image: tristan tan / Shutterstock.com

Now we’re talking.

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Compared to the previous few years, the jump is pretty drastic, from 7.5 in 2017 to 7.9 in 2018.

Image: ptc.gov.sg

According to PTC, “This mirrors the significant improvement in the MRT network’s Mean Kilometres Between Failure (MKBF), from 181,000 train-km in 2017 to 690,000 train-km in 2018. This can be attributed to factors such as intensified maintenance efforts and the huge investments put in by the Land Transport Authority and public transport operators to improve rail reliability over the past three years.

“Besides improving rail reliability, commuters also experienced the benefits of the opening of Downtown Line 3 in October 2017, which could have contributed to the encouraging improvements in mean satisfaction scores for MRT across the board.”

In other words, the number of breakdowns is significantly lower, and the DTL3 has made more people happy.

Bus Satisfaction Score

Image: tristan tan / Shutterstock.com

Unlike MRT, people generally didn’t think that there’s an improvement in the bus services despite having so many new players in the industry.

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Image: ptc.gov.sg

However, it should be noted that the Bus Contracting Model was implemented in 2016, which resulted in an increase in the satisfaction score that year (and stayed flat).

So, what does this mean?

If you’d have noticed, commuters appear to be more satisfied with the MRT in 2018, which resulted in the overall score of public transport in Singapore.

You can agree to disagree, but given that this survey was conducted by an external company, you can’t deny that out of ten friends you have, at least seven to eight of them like the public transport in Singapore.

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George Yang
Email: [email protected]