Chairman, the Land Transport Master Plan 2040 sets an ambitious target—9 in 10 peak public transport journeys completed within 45 minutes.
As a Punggol resident, I speak from experience. A 45-minute door-to-door journey to the city is, for myself and most of my neighbours, a pipe dream. In a city where housing comes at a premium, the families who live in Punggol, Sengkang, Woodlands and other far flung towns made pragmatic choices about where to put down roots. And every morning, they pay for that choice in time. We should not have a two-speed Singapore, where time is a privilege of the few.
Ambitious targets require ambitious infrastructure. And to understand what happens when that ambition falls short, we need look no further than the North East Line.
My fellow members and I have filed multiple parliamentary questions on the North East Line’s capacity crisis. Solutions to the crisis are in short supply. Longer trains would require excavation so disruptive it would shut the line for over a year. Selective Door Operation (‘SDO’) has been studied and rejected. Even at maximum peak frequency, commuters at Hougang and Kovan watch full trains go past. Residents in the north-east have become resigned to long, crowded commutes. We built the North East Line without the headroom to grow it. That decision is now permanent.
The Seletar Line gives us the chance to do better.
In 2018, express services were studied for the Cross Island Line and rejected on cost-benefit grounds. But a point-in-time cost-benefit calculation is the wrong basis for infrastructure that has to serve multiple generations. Seoul’s Line 9 faced identical scepticism of its express service. Demand caught up, and then some. Infrastructure of this scale does not just serve demand. It generates it.
I urge the Government to incorporate provisions for express services on the Seletar Line from the outset—specifically, bypass tracks at all non-interchange suburban stations. Bypass tracks allow us to serve every major underserved catchment along the line’s alignment—Simpang and Yishun East, Seletar and Jalan Kayu, Whampoa, the Greater Southern Waterfront—with local trains while express trains overtake local services at these stations to reach the downtown core at speed.
The time to make this decision is during feasibility studies, not after groundbreaking, and certainly not after the line is in operation.
Sir, we ask young families to move further out in pursuit of affordable homes. The least we can do is to bring them back to the city, quickly. I urge the Ministry to plan the Seletar Line with the foresight the North East Line lacked—and the ambition that the next generation of Singaporeans deserves.
