Bus arrival system vendor penalised for 3 of 4 disruptions; LTA declines to disclose amounts
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The disruptions to the system led to inaccurate bus arrival timings and longer wait times being displayed at bus stops and in apps such as LTA’s MyTransport.SG.
ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
- The bus arrival timing system experienced four disruptions between January and July, causing inaccurate bus timings and long waits at stops and apps.
- The vendor LECIP Singapore, responsible for system maintenance since 2015, was fined by LTA for three of the four disruptions.
- LTA has added hardware redundancies, improved monitoring, and strengthened incident response to prevent future outages before a new cloud-based system in 2027.
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SINGAPORE – The third-party vendor responsible for the upkeep of the bus arrival timing system has been issued financial penalties by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) for three of the four disruptions that occurred in the first seven months of 2026.
In response to The Straits Times’ questions about the financial penalties imposed on vendor LECIP Singapore, LTA said on Aug 11: “The penalties imposed on LECIP Singapore for the three incidents are commercially sensitive, and we are contractually unable to disclose the specific amounts.”
Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow said on Aug 4 in a written reply to a parliamentary question by Workers’ Party MP Kenneth Tiong (Aljunied GRC) that there were four disruptions to the bus arrival timing system – in January, April, June and July.
They were caused by failures of unrelated components, Siow noted.
LTA added on Aug 11 that the penalties imposed on LECIP Singapore were for the three incidents that occurred in January, June and July.
The disruptions to the system led to inaccurate bus arrival timings and longer wait times being displayed at bus stops and in apps such as LTA’s MyTransport.SG.
The vendor, which was not named in Siow’s response, had previously been identified as LECIP Singapore and has worked with the authority since 2015 to manage and maintain the bus arrival timing system.
For the first incident in January, LTA detected issues with the system on Jan 10, and the public was informed on Jan 21. The authority initiated a system reset at 8pm that day.
The system was fully restored about a month later on Feb 12 after resolving a software defect on about 4,000 buses.
On April 18, several fibre-optic cables, including one responsible for transmitting information on buses, were damaged during construction works for a section of the North-South Corridor.
This caused the bus arrival timing system to operate at only 70 per cent capacity for the rest of the day.
And for more than four hours on the afternoon of June 12, there were technical issues displaying bus arrival timings on several journey-planning apps. LTA did not reveal the cause of this disruption.
On the morning of July 14, the system was disrupted for around 1½ hours.
No bus arrival timings were available on the MyTransport.SG app as at 6.40am, though other transport-planning apps displayed arrival timings.
Tiong also asked about interim safeguards that would be put in place for the current bus arrival timing system before the deployment of the new cloud-based system by the end of 2027.
Responding, Siow said LTA has set up additional hardware redundancies, increased monitoring of system performance and strengthened incident response procedures.
These are meant to reduce the risk of further outages in the meantime, he added.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with LTA’s reply.
Additional reporting by Vanessa Paige Chelvan