Forum: Don’t underplay maintenance at the cost of severe rail disruptions
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I read with great concern the news article, “‘We don’t want overmaintenance’: SMRT chairman flags need to balance rail reliability with costs”
While it is necessary to achieve a balance between costs and benefits, one must also look beyond these numbers and consider the time cost of severe delays inflicted on commuters through disrupted commutes, as well as the accompanying psychological stress.
At the end of the day, the key standing metric of mean kilometres between failures is a statistical average that does not take into account extreme events.
It is such high-impact events, while ostensibly rare, that could deal significant blows to our nation’s productivity and public transit reputation, as was the case during the network-wide disruptions of the past.
As project managers will occasionally remark, life is unpredictable, but risks are not.
Just as in the thorny issue of sea-level rise – where the worst-case scenario for Singapore could be inundation of a significant portion of the island by 2100 – we must not wait until the proverbial flood of the century arrives, as it will, before frantically setting up our dykes.
Ronald Chan Wai Hong
