Votre Coeur: Rarely more than 80% full

Rarely more than 80% full

Posted by Mastermind at 7:32 pm

This is a line found in an article from ST online today

MRT standards are not under the PTC's purview, but SMRT claims that its trains are rarely more than 80 per cent full at peak hours.

Full article can be found here too

I really hate it when people use statistics to twist facts. Anyway, we can deduce 3 things from this line.

1.) That 80% is the baseline that SMRT use to gauge whether they will consider to increase the train frequency
2.) That nothing will be done to improve our MRT service in terms of train frequency
3.) That either SMRT is overestimating the total number of passenger their train could take or is trying use a statistical mean over all train stations to get what they want (more earnings)

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the majority of the commuters will be travelling towards the city area during the morning peak hours. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that there will be a lot more people travelling from Boon Lay to City Hall and Tampines to City Hall than City Hall to Boon Lay and City Hall to Tampines.

If we simply assume a 7:3 distribution in the direction where commuters commute, i.e. for every 7 people going towards City Hall, we have 3 going to Boon Lay/Tampines, to get to the 80% average mark, city bound trains will be 112% full while the rest are 48% full only.

The only way for the 80% average to make sense is when the distribution is about 6:4. Then we have 96% full for city bound trains compared to 64% elsewhere.

My assumptions in this estimation is that 50% of the trains are city bound while 50% aren't. This is of course not true due to the North-South line. I won't consider the stretch between Kranji to Woodlands to be city bound in any direction! Hence I am already underestimating my calculations. Of course, SMRT does take that into consideration as the trains frequency for that stretch is much lesser than the rest.

What do you think? Should I be the CEO for SMRT? I must be dreaming.