Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan today (July 27) told an open lie to propaganda state media Straits Times, saying that train reliability has improved by 3 times since he became Transport Minister in 2015.
“In 2015, when I replaced Mr Lui Tuck Yew at the ministry, Singapore’s MRT trains travelled an average of 133,000km between delays of more than five minutes. In the first half of this year (2017), it has happily gone up to nearly 400,000 (393,000) train-km.”
The S$1.76 million-a-year Minister continued lying claiming that the all train lines have seen improvement and the result was satisfactory to him:
“All five lines had improved, with the star performer being the North-East line, which clocked nearly 1 million (978,000) train-km between failures. This is a satisfactory outcome, against our targets of 300,000 MKBF this year, 400,000 MKBF next year and 800,000 train-km by 2020.”
Minister Khaw Boon Wan claimed that due to the improvement, he will be increasing the target to be “7.5” times better than 2015’s standards:
“So I am upping our 2020 target from 800,000 to 1,000,000 train-km… At one million train-km, the system would be 7.5 times more reliable than it was in 2015.”
Minister Khaw Boon Wan also lied about train systems in London and Taipei having issues as serious as Singapore when their train lines started:
“Tthe London Underground and Taipei Metro had forewarned of teething problems when a new signalling system is installed, and that he had highlighted this in Parliament early this year. While there will still be delays, if we have done our best to minimise them, I am sure Singaporeans will be understanding and forgiving.”
The Minister also blamed contractors for the train faults:
“By mistake, a Thales’ engineering team connected an incompatible radio to the radio backbone network of the North-South line and the Tuas West Extension… This caused a sudden congestion on the network which resulted in all North-South line and Tuas West Extension trains losing radio communications.”