Monday, October 03, 2005

Crazy proposition...

Jail term for bus fare cheaters? What a crazy world! Who ever proposed this is a total nut case.

Imagine, thousands of tax payers' money is used to feed those jailbirds who cheat on a few cents worth of bus fare. Good grief!!! The police have nothing better to do or are there as many empty cells as there are empty condo units in Singapore?

Whoever suggest this, probably is so very fed up with the amount of bus fare the bus companies are 'loosing', or is so petty as to why he/she doesn't know how to outwit that bloody expensive EZ-link machine while others can. Hmmm.... but why punish the commuters.

Firstly, the bus companies aren't really 'loosing' much, in fact! Their calculated lost of profits through bus fare cheating is $1 million (how they come up with the figure is indeed amazing, even a rocket scientist won't know how to track this with limited resources). Don't drop your jaw yet, looking at the figures they had claimed they lost through bus fare, how much profit did they clock in last year? $49 million!!!! How profitable!!!

Secondly, they had basically changed the whole operating system of our basic daily life necessity. They had implemented something, which they boasted about, with the primary aim of curbing bus fare cheats. How can they now claim that this drastic change that they had brought into our daily lives is not serving the very intended purpose that they had vowed to overcome? They had made a wrong calculation about the developing cost for the card itself, and forced the commuters to pay for their lack of foresight. Now it seemed that they are still blaming the commuters for them not being able to improve their performance of lowering bus fare cheats significantly. And thus raising bus fares and punishing commuters for their lack of foresight again?

Public transport's main aim is to provide low cost transport to the not-so-well-off community. I don't expect it to earn phenomenon figures. But I do expect them to show a bit more concern to the paying majority who of course cannot afford better lifestyles and thus have to take the bus. If this self-confessed geniuses thought that their machines could help the bus company cut back on their losses due to fare cheats, but displayed such incompetencies of being outwit by so many laymen commuters, they should really rethink if they are in fact apt enough to take up the challenge that upstirred the whole Singapore's travelling behaviour.


Did government privatised this division of public transport so as to not appear contradicting? They implemented COE to curb the rising transport woes. Aiming to cut down the number of privately-owned cars and encouraging their citizens to use the public transport. But they probably can't seem to justify themselves when they keep upping the cost of travelling by public transport, when after they had forced the public to use it rather than own a car.

And now, someone has actually wanted to punish the commuters even more severely when it's obviously the EZ-Link companies' fault for not having enough foresight but egoistic enough to dare the challenge. Why doesn't he/she spend more time in asking our dearest bus company on how they had arrived at the S$1 million figure quoted by them as losses through bus fare cheats?

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