Episode 1179: Fellow Singaporeans, You Seriously Need To Chill Out

The vaunted public transport system in Singapore is taking a major battering lately. Taxi fare hike and not one, but two significant disruptions to the MRT network (albeit on entirely different lines)? It's like the proverbial perfect storm. That said, all the people ranting right now need to take a deep breath and, well, shut up. Sure, in recent years our public transport system has increasingly suffered from problems like overcrowding. Is it still a solid system? Yes, with room for improvement like any piece of infrastructure in a growing city. People are going to latch onto the spate of recent failures and completely dismiss the fact that statistically, it's hard to deny that as far as our public transport is concerned, it functions more often than not. Given the high volume of usage, the surprising thing should be that it doesn't break down more often! In this regard, the parties involved are clearly victims of their own success. They've engineered something that gives the impression of being so absolutely reliable, they've lulled the average Singaporean into a state of complacency. I'm not trying to defend SMRT here, but it is completely unrealistic to expect disruptions never to occur, even such a massive one as today's. I guess Singaporeans aren't going to buy promises that it won't happen again though, given our experience with flooding in Orchard Road...