Early Morning Traffic

The Singapore MRT is one of my favourite ways to travel. Day after day, I take the East-West (Green) line from either Tampines or Simei to our office close to the Redhill station. About 42-45 minutes worth of rail time...costs about a buck-thirty. In spite of the lemming-like crowds, one manages reasonably well...

While one sees the smooth running of trains every 2-5 minutes day-in and day-out as an example of well-oiled machinery, it's when things go spectacularly wrong that one is really impressed.

Sometime last week, I decided to walk to Tampines, rather than Simei, and catch the train from there. When I got there, however, there was more-than-the-usual crowd standing at the entrance to the station, gazing steadfastly at some writing. Every so often, a small section of the crowd would mumble, break away, and dodder down the road, while the rest of the lemmings moved in for a closer look at the writing on the wall.

Not willing to be the only ignoramus on the block, I dutifully donned my lemming-suit and joined in. A terse Singlish message along the lines of "Sorry for the inconvenient, MRT closed, Please follow signs to take the bus to Tanah Merah" greeted me when it was my turn at the edge of the cliff. I must confess that the mumbling and doddering came naturally after that.

After following the crowd (no visible signs anywhere, really) I found myself waiting for a spot in one of the special buses commandeered for this occasion. Orderly crowds, forsooth! I found all the experience of dealing with buses in India useful as I had to elbow my way into the bus for a place. We eventually reached Tanah Merah and were shepherded into a train which took us the rest of the way. There was no charge for the emergency bus service.

Once we were all definitely on our way, I got a chance to look around. Everyone was very annoyed by the delay, but the older folks were more stoic about it. The younger lemmings were texting away on their phones even more furiously than usual. Very uncharacterstically, I found my self in tension for a potential twenty minute delay!

It transpires that over 6,50,000 people were 'inconvenient'ed that morning - by as much as half an hour!

I don't know what impresses me more: the fact that the MRT system simply took an unexpected emergency of such a scale in stride and did a fine job by any account; or the fact that a 30 minute traffic delay, which is so commonplace in Bangalore, could cause such consternation to the Singaporean populace; or the fact that it caused me to actually be concerned about arriving half an hour late!

Had I chosen to walk to Simei as I do usually, I would've been able to walk over to Tanah Merah and save myself 10 minutes! Now that would've been an impressive achievement!