My Encounter with Public Transport, After 2 Years.

Ok. I do not consider taxi as a 'public transport', though legally it is.
I am referring to the MRT and LRT that many not-so-well-to-do people use.

So I had decided to leave my car at the service centre overnight (as told in my previous blog entry.) Time to go home like most Singaporeans.

I had 2 choices to go home :

(1) I can take a bus from the bus-stop in front of my office, and change another bus to reach home, or

(2) I can take MRT and then the LRT back home.

I chose the 2nd option.

First, I walked from my office to the MRT with my colleague. (Complaining about our boss, as usual.) It's a 10 minutes walk.

Reached the MRT station with loads of people, took the escalator up. Found the right platform. Waited for train to arrive.

3 mintues later, one arrived. I can see people having some difficulty squeezing off the train. I squeezed in after most have boarded, and I am left standing near the doorway, while a few more people squeezed into the train behind me.

Now, under any other situations, I am sure I can charge the lady for molesting me and pressing against my behind. But I think this is normal for peak-hour train ride, so I kept quiet.

And I have nothing to hold on to. As the train moves, I have to depend on my well-trained acrobatic balancing skills to deflect all the forces from the train AND other passengers tryng to make me a siamese-twin with the hairy guy in front of me.

I was cautiously fishing out my mobile phone from my belt when an SMS arrived. I did not want to be misunderstood as trying to get fresh with the hairy guy.

As I looked around while the train traveled 3 stations, I could hear 2 guys chatting about their work. Another guy was standing behind me leaning against a glass and reading the newspaper.

Another lady was seated and reading papers as well.

I then remembered a colleague of mine who once told me how he (being tall) was used as a newspaper support for a guy reading papers.

Then I reached the station to change to the LRT. Squeezing out and walking with a big group of people down and up stairs to reach the LRT platform. I am already perspiring.

(I then remembered how I gained weight the couple of months immediately after I bought my car.)

Then the LRT came. At first, people were standing around sparsely, probably leaving some space for passengers to alight. But when the train arrived, everyone squeezed forward, forcing the alighting passengers to have to fight their way out of the train, lest they get pushed back and be brought back to their originating station. Hahaha. It seems funny now, but I am sure they weren't laughing then. I wasn't too.

After people alighted, I squeezed forward trying to find a space in. Suddenly, the door started closing. I stopped. The door opened again, and a few more desparate passengers squeezed in before the door shuts again.

When the door was closed, the whole carriage looked like a can of sardines. with the people flattened against the doors.

The next train arrived, I rushed in and found a seat. By now, I am desparate to go home. In comes everyone else and the carriage was jammed full of people.

I think back to the time that I was stuck in my car in the traffic jam. I was comfortably seated listening to the radio and probably eating some snacks. I wished I had taken the time, trouble and money to pick up the car, even if it were just for the night.

I reached home 45 minutes later. Not too bad considering my usual drive home takes about 25 minutes at the evening peak hour. But I was reminded, yet again, why I am a willing hostage to the expensive car price, the COE, the ERP, the rising petrol prices and the expensive parking.