Taipei Metro improves with experienced civil engineer but Singapore’s MRT becomes “laughing stock” under paper general
Published on 2018-03-17 by The Online Citizen
by Kwok Fangjie
Channel News Asia Insider ran a story on Saturday (17 Mar) highlighting how the Taipei Metro has turned itself around under President B C Yen and became twice as reliable as Singapore’s MRT system.
However, the metro system did not start out well. It said that the Taipei Metro “opened in 1996 was not always a success story. In 2003, six delays of over an hour had a major impact on commuters and affected its image.”
The problem was solved by a setting up “weekly technical meetings that would look at how and why each problem occurred, and how it would be fixed”. All these were written into “more than 7,000 SOP documents [which] are reviewed annually”.
When it changed the signalling system in 2009, there were problems too but the Taipei Metro “gave fare discounts and put extra staff on standby to take over the automated trains”. As a result, consumer’s trust is “concomitantly high” according to the article.
The Taipei metro has now been considered the gold global standard for train reliability, which encounters delays of more than five minutes once every 1 million kilometres. This makes it 2.5 times more reliable than Singapore’s 400,000km.
Khaw urges us to learn from Taipei’s metro, but Singapore’s MRT becomes “laughing stock”
Back in May 2016, Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan lauded the Taipei Metro, saying that "There is strong and tangible ownership of service reliability at all levels, from the chairman of the board, down to the president, management groups, engineers (and) the mechanics,"
Despite the rhetoric, SMRT faced the worst train breakdowns ever the following year on 7 Oct 2017. Train services on the North-South line down for more than 14 hours due to flooding. The next month, it was revealed that SMRT staff were caught falsifying maintenance records.
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