The massive breakdown that crippled rail services between Jurong East and Buona Vista stations for six days in late September affected about 2.6 million passengers. - Photo: ST
SINGAPORE: In the 12 months ending in September, trains on the East-West MRT Line (EWL) travelled an average of about 2.03 million train-km between delays of more than five minutes.
This is down from about 3.36 million train-km between delays that the 57km line recorded in 2023, based on the latest rail reliability figures published by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) on Thursday (Nov 22).
The decline was expected, given the massive breakdown that crippled rail services between Jurong East and Buona Vista stations for six days in late September, affecting about 2.6 million passengers.
But even after factoring in one of the worst disruptions in the MRT system’s 37-year history, the EWL’s performance until September remained well above Singapore’s target of one million train-km between delays.
This is based on mean kilometres between failure (MKBF) – a widely accepted measure of reliability adopted by the Community of Metros (Comet), a global collective comprising 45 metro systems from 42 cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Guangzhou and Tokyo.
This raises the question: How can a rail line pass with flying colours after such a major disruption?
It is also noteworthy that the target was set in 2017, and Singapore’s MRT lines have consistently crossed the one million train-km threshold every year since 2019.
Asked by the Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh if the authorities were thinking about raising the MKBF target beyond one million train-km, Transport Minister Chee Hong Tat said in Parliament in November that the target remains “relevant and valid”.
The authorities, he added, would have to assess carefully whether to raise it further.
This is because there is a trade-off between this and the costs incurred, which will ultimately have to be borne by either taxpayers through higher public transport subsidies or passengers through higher fares.
Is MKBF still relevant?
Given that MKBF is an engineering measure, it is understandably difficult for passengers to relate to the figures and what it means for their day-to-day journeys on public transport.
But for transport regulators, it is a key metric.
The recent drop in the EWL’s MKBF shows the reliability measure at work: The more delays and the longer they last, the lower the MKBF score.
What the MKBF figures have shown is that the EWL had been operating without much incident until the September setback.
In March, the EWL clocked more than five million train-km between failures, before this figure plunged six months later.
Another point to raise here is that no metro system in the world is immune from disruptions, and achieving an MKBF of one million train-km would put any rail line on a par with the world’s best.
For instance, the Circle Line, Singapore’s worst-performing MRT line in 2023, registered about 1.2 million train-km – or 3.6 million train car-km – between failures.
This is about the same as Hong Kong’s MTR, which recorded an average MKBF of 3.7 million train car-km for eight of its 10 lines in 2023.
However, MKBF is just one way to gauge train reliability and it has its limitations. Chief among them is that it does not fully account for the impact of delays and disruptions on passengers.
While the EWL breakdown took six days to resolve and affected more than one out of every six MRT trips taken each day in that period, it was deemed a singular failure from an MKBF perspective.
MKBF also does not take into account the time passengers have to spend in long queues waiting for bridging buses between affected MRT stops, nor does it account for the time wasted having to make significant detours.
Not to mention the opportunity costs of being late to work, missing an important meeting, or the costs of having to take other transport modes such as ride-hailing.
In short, it does not account for the inconvenience that passengers face when services are disrupted.
A transparent, more holistic approach
The question, therefore, is: Should we be looking at other ways to assess how the MRT system is doing?
One suggestion that has come up is for a more holistic approach to measuring rail reliability that considers other metrics related to convenience and service quality.
Comet, for example, uses 30 key performance indicators to benchmark its members. These include labour productivity, cost efficiency and a finer breakdown of the causes behind train delays.
While Comet data is meant to be confidential, that has not stopped some of its members from publishing anonymised benchmarking results showing how they compare with their international peers. The Montreal Metro in Canada has pledged to do so yearly from 2024.
SMRT, a member of Comet, used to publish some of these results in its annual reports too, but stopped doing so after 2016 when it was privatised.
It could start doing so again, but a wrinkle here is that SBS Transit (SBST), the other rail operator in Singapore, is not a Comet member, so it might not have access to the same benchmarking system.
The authorities have also said before that MKBF is not the only metric that is used to reward or penalise rail operators.
Baked into the regulatory framework and licensing conditions is a set of operating and maintenance standards, covering service quality, safety and the reliability of key equipment.
These standards include the passenger injury rate, how punctual trains are in reaching and leaving stations, and how often fare gates, escalators and lifts at stations break down.
As with the Comet data, SMRT used to publish its performance against LTA’s standards in its annual reports, but stopped doing so after 2016.
SBST sometimes discloses its performance against LTA’s standards in its annual reports as well, but often without details.
Given that LTA is regularly kept up to date about how well SMRT and SBST perform, it would be good to make this information public again and on a regular basis.
Doing so can help to shore up confidence about reliability and assuage any unfounded concerns.
Given evolving passenger expectations, other standards could also be considered.
For instance, Hong Kong’s MTR, which publishes service performance results every quarter, has performance indicators for the temperature and ventilation levels on trains and in stations.
Response time to passenger inquiries and the types of passenger complaints lodged are also tracked and made known.
Reflecting the passenger experience
Another metric commonly used by metros worldwide is passenger satisfaction. In Singapore, the Public Transport Council conducts yearly online surveys to measure this.
Again, it may be useful to consider doing more here to sharpen the insights gained.
For instance, could these surveys be done more often? The operator of the metro system in the Danish capital Copenhagen, for instance, measures customer satisfaction through personal interviews with about 1,000 randomly selected passengers every quarter.
Experts such as transport economist Walter Theseira have also, in the past, suggested using other more passenger-centric reliability indicators, such as delay-minutes, a measure of the scale of train delays.
Another example of this is “lost customer hours” - an estimate of the time lost by passengers because of service disruptions. The London Underground used to measure this until the Covid-19 pandemic that struck in 2020 affected the accuracy of their modelling.
Using something like this to measure rail reliability here, in addition to MKBF, would reflect more fully the impact and economic cost of an MRT breakdown during peak hours, for example, compared with one that happened during less busy periods.
This should not be difficult, given the data that can be mined from public transport travel cards.
One argument that has been used against introducing new performance indicators and regulatory mechanisms is the cost of doing so - in terms of the time needed to collect this new data and the burden of compliance.
But if having a more comprehensive scorecard translates to greater assurance and more people using public transport, the benefits will outweigh the costs.
The reliability of Singapore’s MRT system is comparable to some of the world’s best, but it is not infallible.
What is important is to have a transparent system that allows the authorities, operators and the public to track the real cost of delays to passengers. - The Straits Times/ANN
