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Even when a train with room to spare comes along, he has to fight for standing space for the 35-minute commute from Bukit Gombak to Tanjong Pagar via Jurong East.
It has been like this at 8.30am for 10 years. He said: 'It is a nightmare trying to board the train from Jurong East because there are always already so many people in it.'
It is hoped his situation and that of other commuters will improve from next week, when additional train trips will be introduced during the peak hours, as announced by Transport Minister Raymond Lim last Friday in his second of three policy speeches on improving the land transport system here.
Operators SMRT and SBS Transit will add 93 train trips - 83 for SMRT and 10 for SBS Transit - every week to ease peak-hour congestion in the mornings and evenings.
This will mean less-crowded trains and a cut in waiting time by up to 15 per cent.
With the current peak-hour waiting time ranging from 2-1/2 to 4-1/2 minutes, a 15-per-cent cut will bring the longest wait down to about 3.8 minutes.
And when the carrying capacity of the North-South and East-West lines is increased by 15 per cent in four years with new trains, waiting times will be reduced to two minutes.
Although the trains can pack in up to 1,800 passengers, they now carry up to 1,400 during peak hours.
But 57 per cent of commuters who responded to a survey by the Land Transport Authority last year said they were not satisfied with the crowded trains.
A Straits Times check of three of the major stops on the East-West Line - Bedok, Raffles Place and Jurong East - during yesterday's morning peak hour found that getting on board in Bedok and Jurong East, near the two ends of this line, was most difficult between 7.30am and 9am.
Trains were on time and arrived every two to three minutes but some commuters were unable to board.In most cases, commuters managed to get on the next train.
Some commuters, however, have resorted to making an extra journey upstream in order to secure a seat before heading for their destinations.
Legal consultant Gwendolyn Lee, 24, for example, travels seven minutes west from Jurong East to Boon Lay, and then takes the east-bound train from Boon Lay to Raffles Place, where she works.
She said: 'I hate to stand through the journey because it gets really uncomfortable when you can feel people breathing near you.'
The same thing happens on the eastern end of this line: Passengers take the train to Pasir Ris terminal station to get a seatbefore they head west for downtown.
The Straits Times observed though, that commuters are sometimes unable to board because everyone wants to be near the doors; they also prefer the centre carriages, which stop closer to the escalators.
The carriages to the front or rear of the train not only have boarding space, but they sometimes have vacant seats also.
Ms Doris Leong, a 50-year-old service manager who travels from Pasir Ris to Raffles Place daily, said: 'If people would just move in a little bit, everyone would have a little more space.'
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