Today, the Straits Times reported that "Singapore's rail network experienced 40 service disruptions lasting more than 10 minutes each in a one-year period between April 2010 and March 2011 - or nearly one per week."
Actually, 40 disruptions in 52 weeks - that's only 0.77 disruptions per week. It's surprising that the Straits Times actually rounded 0.77 to "nearly one", since it is rather misleading.
Still, both SMRT and SBS Transit were not fined despite the high frequency of disruptions. This was because performance standards were still met, with train services being available "at least 98 per cent of the time".
While 98% sounds like a pretty high minimum standard, this cannot be further from the truth. Let's see what 98% is. Assuming that trains operate for 18 hours a day for 365 days, it means that it is perfectly all right for trains to be unavailable for 131.4 hours, or around 5.5 days in a year. This is, of course, based on operating hours as an assumption.
So is 98% very high? I think not.
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