SMRT Fiasco

Recently SMRT went under fire for frequent disruptions of its train operations. The worst incident so far happened on Thursday night where there was a 5 hour breakdown along the busiest stretch of its North South line during peak hour. News reports reveal that many passengers were trapped in train carriages without light or air conditioning. Someone even used a fire extinguisher to smash a window for some ventilation. Passengers had to be evacuated along the tracks.

The CEO of SMRT had to make a public apology. There were promises to look into the entire system and review, etc. Until now, it's only possible causes which had been found. Nothing concrete yet.

After that, someone saw an inappropriate message broadcast to SMRT taxi drivers, alerting them of an income opportunity due to the train breakdown. Talk about adding fuel to the fire. This is amid unhappiness with taxi fare hikes.

I saw an article on Yahoo with the headline "Singapore Stocks-Down at midday; SMRT Corp outperforms". SMRT was seen to be a beneficiary of the taxi fare hike. It's a logical win-win situation for SMRT. Taxi fare hike may result in direct revenue for SMRT. They win. The taxi fare hike may drive more commuters to trains. They also win. In August, a 1% increase in bus and train fares was approved by the Public Transport Council. SMRT still win.

And here the government is warning about possible economic storms, etc.

It is not surprising that many Singaporeans are unhappy about the situation. It is a definite let down that such a corporation gave the impression that they did not have a Business Continuity Plan or a Disaster Recovery Plan. Actually, this may not be relevant because no disaster seemed to have actually happened. What seemed to have happened was something broke down somewhere on the tracks, in the stations, or related place. There was no obvious Act Of God, no natural disaster, etc. How such an embarrassing situation can happen under the management of such an establishment is not something laymen, like myself, can comprehend.

At work, I stress to my team that a detailed Standard Operating Procedure is very critical. However, we are humans and cannot predict every single possibility. We may miss something because humans are totally unpredictable. I've learnt that the hard way. A classic example happened a couple of weeks ago. I asked someone to help me courier some documents. For some unfathomable reason, this person did not send the documents out until a week later.

What I've learned is that we are allowed to make mistakes. But we are not allowed to not learn from them. We usually acknowledge our mistake, come up with a corrective action plan, fix the issue, come up with a control point to prevent future occurrences and move on.

That being said, the situation with SMRT is admittedly different because it is about public transportation. To be honest, I seldom take train and bus. I cannot claim to understand how the commuters affected by the recent SMRT fiascos feel. However, I can say that with service providers of public services shoulder a heavy responsibility and they should live up to the expectation of the public to the best of their ability.

With prior small occurrences, someone should have said, "Let's review the whole system before something major happens." Of course it's easier to say that with hindsight. I hope that there won't be news about the top executives of SMRT being paid fantastic bonuses despite such incidents just because the bonuses have been declared. That would really endorse the saying that bad things come in threes - train breakdown, income opportunity and skyrocket bonuses.....good luck to Saw Phaik Hwa.