Pictures from Singapore: The Bus

Singapore's mass transportation system is one of the best and envied public transportation system in the world. Even though the entire public transport is owned just by two companies--the SMRT and the MRT-- it is highly efficient and surprisingly accessible, and much cheaper than similar systems, say the Japanese system.

This is a series of pictures taken on the Singapore SMRT buses)and a taxi).

The first picture on the right is a transport card reader. When you get inside the bus, you tap your card into one of those. You tap on them again as you get out, and the system automatically deducts the cost of the journey from the card. This system hardly has any faults, though it might appear otherwise. First, you cannot get away with tapping  the card as you enter the vehicle. The bus drivers(they call 'em bus captains) will check carefully whether you have tapped the card or not. Once your card is tapped, there is no getting away. If you forget to tap your card, you will be charged all the way from where you began to the very last stop, which should tell you generally to shut the fk up trying to fool the system.

The second photo is of a Singaporean taxi. Like all taxis in civilised East Asian countries, Singaporean taxis have GPS systems, their own integrated network to find customers, separate communications with the control room in case of emergency or special occasions, wireless chips embedded, and a printer for printing the bills. Only idiots royally foolish are cheated here.

The picture on the right shows that most of the buses there are double-decked, and air-conditioned. If you are at the very back of the second decker and need to get out of the crowded bus in the very next stop, you need not worry--every seat has a bell to it that goes straight to the bus captain, showing him which bell was rung, giving him the appropriate knowledge on how long to wait for the passengers to get out.

If the dashboard of Taxis is hi-tech, a bus dashboard is super-duper hi-tech. IN addition to the equipments already present in the taxis, the bus dashboard has several more electronic panels whose purpose I did not dare asking. The bus dashboards look more like airplane cockpits than thir Nepali bus counterparts. So awesome.

Here, on the left are the purple card devices, the little red box in the center is for taking tickets in case you forgot your cart, the stairs on the right take you up to the second deck.

Everything in Singapore is super-strict. Case in point: the many, many many warnings and notices posted on the buses.

It's interesting though, that they have to remind the passengers that it is by law illegal to punch and/or assault the bus captain. Ooh, ooh, I'm sorry, I was not aware I would get in trouble with the law for setting off fireworks in the bus and then stabbing the bus captain who'd come to stop me with a huge Samurai sword. You should put up notices regarding such things, ya' know?

A Singaporean bus from the back. There's a lot of respect for privacy and personal space there. It's just on the buses though--if you get into a train at about 10 at night, you will be shoved, pushed and pulled more in one night than all the pushing, pulling and shoving in public transport combined you had experienced in Nepal before that.