On Aug. 30, Minister for Transport Khaw Boon Wan announced that the MRT system has hit 1 million km between delays.

With this announcement, it means that the Land Transport Authority's (LTA) target for rail reliability has been achieved months ahead of schedule.

Achieved 2017 target

In 2017, Khaw set a bold target for trains to hit 1 million km between delays by 2020.

This is an international performance indicator for rail reliability, and measures how far trains travel before experiencing a delay that lasts for more than five minutes.

This measurement is also known as mean km between failure (MKBF).

This was a big step up from the first half of 2017, where trains reportedly travelled 393,000km before experiencing a delay.

According to ST, Khaw had initially set the target to be 800,000 train-km by 2020, using the best-in-class Taipei Metro as a point of reference.

However, when the Taipei Metro improved to hit 1 million MKBF, Khaw adjusted his target for LTA to be 1 million MKBF in 2020 as well.

New milestones

In his speech on Aug. 30, Khaw stated that another metric of rail reliability is the number of days without major delay of more than 30 minutes.

Both the Northeast Line (NEL) and Downtown Line (DTL) crossed the 300-day milestone recently.

The Sengkang-Punggol LRT crossed the 200-day milestone as well.

Khaw noted that four years ago, crossing the 100-day mark was a challenge for all lines, and attributed these achievements to the operators' continued efforts.

More than S$25m in cost savings

Besides raising the efficiency of the rail networks, Khaw also applauded the train operators for their cost efficiency efforts.

Together, both operators have saved more than S$25 million through these cost efficiency efforts.

Khaw explained that both SMRT and SBS Transit looked into implementing several operational improvements, including the Japanese-inspired Kaizen method to boost efficiency.

According to SMRT, among the improvements is the Laser Rail Profile Measurement Trolley, which allowed inspection of rails to be done more efficiently.

Top image by Jason Fan.