And they say we should take public transport...

Well the global theme right now is to go green right? Which means to cut down on Greenhouse gases by reducing private cars on the road and switch to public transport. Sounds like great. Brilliant. That's an ideal!

NOT!

If you have not taken the public transport in Singapore, then I say stick to the car. Although Singapore is such a small country, I always used to tell my foreign friends that I take a minimum of an hour to travel to school, sometimes when it gets bad, even 2hours. And they were shocked. They always thought that with the size of Singapore, travelling to anywhere should be a zip. Well that's true when you are driving a car. But the bus system really puts you down, down, down......

Haha, recently, NUS came up with a discussion forum www.nussu.org.sg/151 for people to contribute ideas on how to improve the bus 151 which travels from Hougang to NUS. It's really a forum where people complain about the punctuality & frequency of the bus. Plus the dumb terrain on the school compound makes it difficult to have a bendy-bus nor a double-decker. Oh wow, so the bus is always packed as it serves, just to list a few schools along its route, NUS, SIM, NP, HCI and NJC, and you can't even increase it's capacity?!

Last wed, I tried for the first time to take this bus to school, with the ignorance of a person doing something for the first time. I always thought the bus was rather swift when it travels from NUS to Hougang, so it should be the same the other way, what's more it's 11am, past the peak hour. Well, I was ghastly wrong. The bus took at least 20min to arrive which already made me wanted to head home, and the bus was pretty packed. That was not a good first time.

Now the government encourages citizens to take the public transport, and penalises car drivers by erecting ERP (Electronic Road Pricing) gantries on many many roads, and now the prices of fuel have gone up too. But then since the price of fuel increases, so does the price of public transport. Now what?

The LTC or whatever relevant department should seriously review the state of the bus system and improve it, BEFORE trying to encourage users to switch from private vehicles to public transport.

Well right now, I say, the better deal is to stick to driving a car to school which would take probably half an hour (of comfortable seating may I add) to more than an hour on public transport.