I found something that convinces me to consider switching to public on occasions. There’s a Premium bus service 582, that runs from Jurong East to NTU. It costs $2.30 per trip, and going by the routing details, it should be cruising along the PIE from the Jurong Town Hall exit to the Jalan Bahar exit.

If that’s the case, I no longer need to take a bus to Boon Lay and wait for the horrific 179 or 199. Now, all I have to do is to figure out the frequency of the bus. The downside is the service doesn’t run all day, so if I have to stay late, then I’ll still need to fall back on 179 and 199.

I like the idea of these direct, no-standing premium buses. Allowing more bus operators to run these services would help keep cars off the roads to a degree, especially on popular routes.

In the future, I hope to see better integration of MRT/LRT services. LRTs can complement existing feeder bus services, that allow commuters to transfer from the main trunk MRT lines, to get back home. Not unlike the estates of Bukit Panjang, Seng Kang and Punggol, it would be great to see this model established in other HDB estates.

Another idea would be to have express train services that stop at certain stops only. This is near impossible to achieve on the current MRT lines, because of the way the tracks are laid. However, for the planned lines, this can be an option to consider. E.g. you can have express trains that run from the city to the extreme ends of the country, while stopping at only a number of key interchanges along the way. This would decrease the travelling time of people living in the far west, east, north. People who live closer to the city, can take the slower stop-at-every-stop trains, and their journey time would be unchanged, with less crowded trains.

Just some ideas. We need a package of measures, especially further enhancements to the public transport system so that further ERP changes can truly achieve its aim of re-distributing the scarce resource of road space.