Up, up and away

It is said that there is no certainty in life except death and taxes. Well, in Singapore, you can add public transport fare increases. And that's because there is a formula that stipulates such adjustments EVERY year, no matter if the public transport operators provide good and efficient services. This includes an age-old bugbear, which is the timely arrival of buses and their frequencies. Just yesterday, a friend of mine complained of dreading travelling to work because only one bus service plies the route near where she works and she has had to board the second or even the third bus because the first/second one that comes along will simply be too packed to board.

And here, you have the Public Transport Council (PTC) deciding in favour of the transport operators, namely SBS Transit and SMRT, to increase fares across the board by 1%. You might think that 1% is not a whole lot compared to the 2.8% that was asked by the operators, but for any service which falls short frequently, 1% is a percent too much. Is it any coincidence that SMRT, the subway operator, just announced a massive increase in the number of trains that will be put into operation to address the problem of congestion? Why in the first place did the congestion come about? Some people were 'sleeping', right? Well, let's see. Don't count your chicks before they are hatched. Probably only in Singapore do you have a situation where a vendor is allowed to increase prices BEFORE any improvement can be seen and felt by its customers in its services. Yep, Singapore is really business friendly country. Customers? They are there to milk them dry. Commuters have no choice at all as they have to commute to work to earn a living.

But the operators would protest that oil prices have increased, which has eaten into their profits. Coupled with that the increase in their manpower cost, and moreover, there is the annual price adjustment formula (which always works out to an increase), all of which justify asking for the 2.8%. Cost pressures from oil prices? Come on, which business is not adversely affected by oil price increases? And when oil prices decreases, you don't hear from these same public transport operators.

Manpower cost? Every business has manpower cost issues. Apparently, SBSTransit's and SMRT's perennial solution is to charge its commuters higher fares. I wished that some independent party can audit these companies' operations to discover if there are not areas in which manpower cost can be lowered, or if there are not inefficiencies that are not being addressed. The certainly of increasing fares annually, and lack of real competition (mandated by the government, no less) provide no incentive for the operators to do anything about lowering manpower costs. To hedge their bets, they can just 'mark up' the fare increase requested for, have the PTC lower and approve it, and SBSTransit and SMRT can laugh all the way to the bank. Oh sure, they will say that they have improved one thing or another, but they would not have had to try hard enough. Why is it paying its CEO millions of dollars annually if manpower costs are so dire? To these public transport operators, I say, deal with it, and don't beg for more to pay your CEO even more every year.

The PTC claims that public transport fare prices have, on aggregate, decreased between 2008 and 2010 by 3.4%. And what do you know, services have gone from bad to worse within these same years. Sometimes I wonder if the authorities are so fixated on numbers that they miss this point - the real value or lack of it, to the commuting public, which makes it so difficult for long-suffering commuters to swallow a fare increase, however slight, or seemingly well justified. Perhaps its members who sit in judgement never take public transport often enough?

I truly look forward to the day when an increase in public transport fares will be accepted because commuters have seen the value that these operators have given them, and not the pain of the daily commute. Sadly, that day has yet to come. With things as they are, that day may very well never come. After all, I have been waiting all my life...

See also: 1 percent transport fare hike sparks debate online