This morning, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) announced updated features for its new MRT trains on the North-South and East-West Lines. Apparently, these 12 trains will be the first in the country to feature “tip-up seats” that can be closed to create bigger standing spaces for commuters during peak hours.
Each car will offer four sets of three tip-up seats in the centre, and these will be put in the up position during morning and evening peak periods. But before you say something about how no one will bother to put up the seats, they can only be folded and unfolded by the train driver, Channel NewsAsia reported.
However, we’re not entirely sure how that would work, or how much of a delay that would cause — especially if drivers have to actually leave their seat and manually carry out the process every single day during rush hour. But on the plus side, when all the seats are tipped up, the trains will offer standing room for 100 more commuters, The Straits Times noted.
Still, netizens weren’t exactly pleased with this new development.
Besides that, two other features for the trains include LTA’s logo stamped on the carriages for the first time (to represent ownership of MRT trains under the New Rail Financing Framework), and an improved Current Collector Device that sounds out automatic alerts whenever something goes wrong, so that the problem can be fixed before commuters have time to tweet complaints against Singapore’s train system.
Find out more about the new improvements below.
These 12 trains, built by the Kawasaki Sifang Consortium in China, are part of the 57 new ones progressively brought into service since 2017 on both lines, which are the oldest in the country.
Forty-seven have since been delivered, and the last 10 will be here by the end of 2018, increasing the total number of trains on both lines to 198. Once testing is completed, the trains will gradually start service in the second half of the year.
