Another victim of the pandemic

The completion of the six stations in the second stage of the Thomson-East Coast Line (TEL) will be delayed by three months due to the impact of Covid-19, said Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung yesterday.

Hence, the stations - from Springleaf to Caldecott - will open only in the first quarter of next year, having initially been scheduled to open later this year.

Argh. I had been looking forward to the opening of the stations as the one bright thing to happen in this utterly abysmal year. Alas, it is not to be.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) said in January that the second stage of the TEL was about 90 per cent complete and was on track to open in the later part of this year.

But Mr Ong said in a written reply to Workers’ Party MP Jamus Lim (Sengkang GRC) yesterday that the circuit breaker period between April and June, along with the phased reopening afterwards, had caused delays to the completion.

Most construction work was suspended during the circuit breaker.

Associate Professor Lim also asked whether there would be any spillover delays to other major planned MRT projects.

Mr Ong said: “Unlike the TEL2 which is near completion and prioritised for resumption of work, we will only be able to better assess the length of delays on subsequent phases of TEL and other MRT projects when construction activities have more fully resumed.”

That sounds like a yes...

He added that the Government remains committed to significantly expanding the MRT network, from around 230km today to 360km by the early 2030s. This includes opening the remaining stages of the TEL and completing the circle with Circle Line Stage 6. It also includes the building of the North East Line extension, Jurong Region Line and Cross Island Line.

The TEL, which was originally set to be completed in 2024, will span 43km and serve about 500,000 commuters daily in its initial years.

It is Singapore’s sixth MRT line, with a total of 32 new stations, including eight interchange stations.

Two interchange stations - Caldecott and Bright Hill - are under the second phase of the line.

The first stage of the line, comprising Woodlands North, Woodlands, and Woodlands South MRT stations, opened in January.

About 100,000 households will benefit from the first two phases of the line, according to previous estimates by the LTA.

***

Some photos I took of Stage 1 of the Thomson-East Coast Line in early February, soon after it opened:

The vast platform of Woodlands North MRT Station.

Woodlands North.

The Thomson-East Coast Line section of Woodlands MRT Interchange.

The interior of a Kawasaki Heavy Industries & CRRC Qingdao Sifang CT251 train, which is the rolling stock for the new line.

Woodlands South MRT Station.

The real costs of rail

Credit: Land Transport Guru.

Higher rail reliability has come at a substantial cost, with taxpayers having to subsidise rail operations by nearly $600 million last year.

This is a stark change from before the New Rail Financing Framework (NRFF) came into full effect in 2018, when operators owned operating assets like trains and funded replacements with fares - a regime which worked initially, but eventually resulted in patchy service.

Under NRFF, the Government owns all assets, and operators pay a licensing charge and collect fare revenue. The charges can vary according to an operator’s profitability.

In response to queries from The Straits Times, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) said licensing fee collection for the financial year ended on March 31 last year “was only around $3 million”, as rail operations have not been profitable.

Meanwhile, there was a depreciation charge of about $578 million in operating assets for the same year, the LTA said. “The difference will need to be subsidised by the Government, as operating subsidy.”

When the licence charge paid by operators to use operating assets is not enough to cover the depreciation cost of eventually replacing them, the Government will have to use taxpayer monies to top up the difference. The subsidy, which is put into a railway sinking fund managed by the LTA, ensures that there will be sufficient funds set aside for the eventual renewal of the system, an LTA spokesman said.

She attributed the operators’ poor financials to recent efforts to improve rail reliability that have increased their costs. The MRT network currently has one delay for every 1.6 million train-km clocked, compared with 133,000 train-km in 2015.

Much of the improvement came from the renewal of the North-South and East-West lines that cost more than $2.5 billion to undertake.

Beyond that, operators have had to do significantly more preventive maintenance, which often entails changing parts well before they wear out. This is a change from the previous practice of carrying out largely corrective maintenance.

The LTA said: “Commuters benefit from this shift, and we have seen a decisive shift from private to public transport over the years.”

I frequently critique official policies with regards to transport and urban development, but I also give credit where it is due (really!). In this case, taxpayers’ money has indeed been well-spent on subsidising rail line renewal and preventive maintenance. The plunge in frequency of significant delays in rail service is evidence of this. As LTA said, commuters benefit. And more people will be convinced to ditch private transport for public transport. It’s a positive feedback loop.

Singapore University of Social Sciences transport economist Walter Theseira reckons the country is headed for “an eventual government bailout” of rail operators if they are consistently unprofitable.

He noted that if rail operators’ lack of profitability is because the fare revenue they collect is not enough to cover the level of rail service demanded by regulators and operators, “then it is actually more appropriate for the Government to just subsidise the system transparently, the same way that buses are subsidised”.

Dr Theseira added that the bus contracting model - where the Government pays operators fixed fees to run services and collects fares - would allow for more transparency and predictability in the subsidy amount. It could also allow for more competition and thus cost benchmarking.

But he noted that the Government spent about $1 billion on bus subsidies last year. This came about when fare revenue fell short of the value of contracts awarded to operators.

The contracting model has been positive for bus operators, though. SBS Transit posted record earnings of $80.1 million for the year ended Dec 31, 2018.

Observers reckon costs will have to be recovered partly through fare adjustments.

In an interview with Lianhe Zaobao earlier this week, Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung noted that Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat had announced that there will be no increase in government fees because of the pandemic.

These relatively new rail and bus contracting models - put in place for only a few years - have been promising in pushing transport companies to focus less on maximising profits and more on optimising commuter service and preventive maintenance. However, COVID-19 remains the biggest challenge to them thus far - what with a steep drop in ridership and hence fare revenue, and the economic downturn not making it kosher to raise fares to cover the shortfall.

Although public transport fares are not considered government fees, Mr Ong said he hopes the Public Transport Council (PTC) “will also take this policy into consideration” during its annual fare review exercise.

Responding on how it would act in the exercise, slated to start this month, the PTC said it considers “all relevant information, including the macroeconomic indices and prevailing economic conditions as well as the need to balance fare affordability, financial sustainability and the impact of its fare decision on various commuter groups”.

The council said it will announce its decision when it is ready.

The Caravanserai

I recently came across this intriguing creation, a necessary offspring of the age-old need for intercontinental, yet plodding, transport: The Caravanserai.

From Wikipedia:

A caravanserai or caravansary was a roadside inn where travellers (caravaners) could rest and recover from the day’s journey. Caravanserais supported the flow of commerce, information and people across the network of trade routes covering Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe, most notably the Silk Road. Although many were located along rural roads in the countryside, urban versions of caravanserais were also historically common in cities throughout the Islamic world, though they were often called by other names such as khan, wikala, or funduq.

The word کاروانسرای kārvānsarāy is a Persian compound word combining kārvān “caravan” with sarāy “palace”, “building with enclosed courts”. Here “caravan” means a group of traders, pilgrims or other travellers, engaged in long-distance travel. The word is also rendered as caravansary, caravansaray, caravanseray, caravansara, and caravansarai. In scholarly sources, it is often used as an umbrella term for multiple related types of commercial buildings similar to inns or hostels, whereas the actual instances of such buildings had a variety of names depending on the region and the local language. However, the term was typically preferred for rural inns built along roads outside of city walls.

Caravanserais were a common feature not only along the Silk Road, but also along the Achaemenid Empire’s Royal Road, a 2,500-kilometre-long ancient highway that stretched from Sardis to Susa according to Herodotus: “Now the true account of the road in question is the following: Royal stations exist along its whole length, and excellent caravanserais; and throughout, it traverses an inhabited tract, and is free from danger.” Other significant urban caravanserais were built along the Grand Trunk Road in the Indian subcontinent, especially in the region of Mughal Delhi and Bengal Subah.

A 17th-century caravanserai in southern Iran. Credit: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A 16th-century caravanserai in Cairo, Egypt. Credit: Sailko, CC BY 3.0.

In the first few years after the founding of modern Singapore in 1819, development was concentrated in the southern part of the island, where the port town was located at the mouth of the Singapore River. However, from the 1820s, trunk roads began to be laid down from the port to eventually all corners of the island, complementing the agricultural development of the island’s interior. My book Jalan Singapura details this.

Back then, transport was rudimentary - people travelled on foot, or using horses, bullocks, and associated carts and carriages. Cross-Island travel would have been slow, taking hours. I can imagine government or municipal officials, such as surveyors, taking a good part of a day to travel from the Town to a far-flung corner which would now be Jurong, Woodlands, or Changi, spending the night there, and then returning to “civilisation” the following day.

Which is where my interest in Caravanserai comes in. I wonder whether such facilities were built in the early days of modern Singapore, in the 1820s and 1830s, when cross-island transport was still in its early legs. Was there a market for such a business? Did the authorities run such facilities instead? How were these buildings like? Who patronised them?

And the challenge for me, the historian - if they had existed, how do I go about finding them?

I will take on this challenge.

The word serai is sometimes used with the implication of caravanserai. A number of place-names based on the word sarai have grown up: Mughal Serai, Sarai Alamgir and the Delhi Sarai Rohilla railway station for example, and a great many other places are also based on the original meaning of “palace”.

Of course, the Singapore place name “Geylang Serai” immediately comes to mind. However, this time, the “Serai” in “Geylang Serai” is Malay for lemongrass, which used to be grown in the area. I am not aware of any other place name in Singapore with “Serai” in it. That said, I am very happy to be proven wrong!