Bus arrival timing system vendor penalised for three of four disruptions between January and July

AI generated

SINGAPORE – The third-party vendor responsible for the upkeep of the bus arrival timing system has been handed financial penalties by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) for three of the four disruptions.

Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow said on Aug 4 in a written reply to a parliamentary question by Workers’ Party MP Kenneth Tiong (Aljunied GRC) that there were four disruptions to the bus arrival timing system in January, April, June and July.

They were caused by failures of unrelated components, Siow noted.

The disruptions to the system led to inaccurate bus arrival timings and longer wait times being displayed at bus stops and in apps such as LTA’s MyTransport.SG.

The vendor, which was not named in Siow’s response, had previously been identified as LECIP Singapore and has worked with the authority since 2015 to manage and maintain the bus arrival timing system.

For the first incident in January, LTA detected issues with the system on Jan 10, and the public was informed on Jan 21. The authority initiated a system reset at 8pm that day.

The system was fully restored about a month later on Feb 12 after resolving a software defect on about 4,000 buses.

On April 18, several fibre-optic cables, including one responsible for transmitting information about buses, were damaged during construction works for a section of the North-South Corridor. This caused the bus arrival timing system to operate at only 70 per cent capacity for the rest of the day.

And for over four hours on the afternoon of June 12, there were technical issues displaying bus arrival timings on several journey-planning apps. LTA did not reveal the cause of this disruption.

On the morning of July 14, the system was disrupted for around 1½ hours. No bus arrival timings were available on the MyTransport.SG app as at 6.40am, though other transport-planning apps displayed arrival timings.

Tiong also asked about interim safeguards that would be put in place for the current bus arrival timing system before the deployment of the new cloud-based system by the end of 2027.

Responding, Siow said LTA has set up additional hardware redundancies, increased monitoring of system performance and strengthened incident response procedures.

These are meant to reduce the risk of further outages in the meantime, he added.

The Straits Times has asked LTA about the financial penalties imposed on the vendor and which incidents prompted these actions.