Over 90% of bus arrival time system restored; LTA starts upgrade of fare, bus management systems
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Bus arrival timings have been inaccurate since Jan 10, when the Land Transport Authority first detected the issue.
ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
SINGAPORE – The availability of bus arrival timings has been restored to above 90 per cent, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) said on Feb 7.
It added that it has started upgrading the fare and bus fleet management systems, which will be completed within the next two years.
LTA said it has been working with the contractor since Jan 21 to restore the bus arrival timing system’s performance, which involved clearing the memory cache and manually updating firmware for the transmitters on 4,000 buses. In some cases, the transmitters were also replaced.
LTA said: “Instances of missing arrival timings or longer headways are expected to continue to decrease as the expected time of arrival system performance stabilises.
“We thank commuters for their patience during this period and apologise for the inconvenience caused.”
Caches store frequently used data to retrieve information more quickly. As more data is stored, however, systems could become sluggish, possibly glitching or crashing. This disrupts data transmissions between buses and the central servers that compute the estimated arrival times.
LTA had initially estimated on Jan 22 that the system would be completely fixed in four days
But it found that another 1,000 buses required manual firmware updates as well, with the system expected to be fully restored early this week
The issue was first detected by LTA on Jan 10, with further inaccuracies found throughout the week.
The public was informed of the inaccuracies on Jan 21, following which LTA initiated a reset at 8pm
As a result, bus stop displays and apps such as LTA’s MyTransport.SG and third-party ones were unable to provide information on bus timings.
The system was switched on again on Jan 23 for testing, and LTA said more than 60 per cent of bus timings would be available.
It did caution that the information would not be fully available or accurate, although “these should gradually become less common as we progressively restore the system”.
LTA initially said the technical issue affected a “small proportion of buses”, but this was later revised to about half of the bus fleet of the operators.
As at the end of 2025, there were 6,067 public buses in Singapore.
