Thursday, January 17, 2013

Cross Island Line, Jurong Region Line: New MRT Lines

The Land Transport Authority announced today that there will be two additional MRT lines: Cross Island Line and the Jurong Region Line in the decades to come. I believe this piece of news could not be more timely, coming right after the Nomination Day of the Punggol East By-Election when transport woes in Singapore could be a hotly debated topic for the Opposition Parties during their rallies.

I hope that the Cross Island Line will enable commuters from the east a faster commute to the west and vice-versa as currently, despite the quite-extensive MRT network on our island, getting from East to West and from West to East still takes close to an hour each if one chooses the fastest direct route via the MRT train.

I am not sure whether the construction of more new towns, more MRT lines, more HDB flats, more condominiums is the only way our Singapore can continue to stimulate our economy? Are there other ways besides constructing the aforementioned amenities, new places of interests, new shopping centres, going underground to carve out more space that we can continue to stimulate our economy?

I note that building more of the aforementioned amenities and infrastructure is to cater to an increasing population of Singapore which is augmented by foreigners. But let us not just rely on cheap foreign talent, rather we should improve on our productivity.  

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