The cyclist-motorist conflict - It's time the LTA did something

A paralysis of indecision happens when someone cannot decide between two or more courses of action that will independently lead to conflicting outcomes. We have seen how this can affect regulatory agencies such as the HSA, when trying to decide between pleasing the biomedical industry and protecting public interests A proper balance between conflicting outcomes may be difficult to strike. The indecisive will often just sit on their hands, and hope the problem will blow away, or at the very least stay away until the decision maker can escape to another, usually higher appointment.

The problems between cyclists and motorists have been brewing for a very long time. It's not as if the LTA has not been aware of it. Gigamole had posted before on this conflict almost exactly 2 years ago. Yet no action had been taken since then. Recently, this has blown up again because of some tragic and unnecessary accidents between cyclists and motorists. 

An increasing cyclist lobby are rightfully clamouring for more space, more consideration and more safety. On the other hand motorists say cyclists are often irresponsible on the roads, that motorists feel they have more rights to, as they pay road taxes while cyclists do not. Truth be told, both parties do engage in risky, irresponsible behaviour. Who is right?

It is during times like this that the LTA need to step in and openly declare the appropriate boundaries, physical as well as behavioural. It is in this situation that the LTA has been neglectful, and in my mind irresponsibly indecisive. I can appreciate their dilemma. On one hand they do not want to restrict the behaviour and recreational choices of the growing cycling population. Yet the road system is far from adequate to accommodate both cyclist and motorist needs. Motoring traffic is congested enough as it is already. S what does LTA do....? It appears they just want to sit on their hands and hope the problem will be delayed to the next cohort of managers.

So here is Gigamole pleading again with the LTA.... please do something about this. Before more unnecessary deaths occur. Make the rules clear to both the cycling and motoring populations, and be committed to enforce them until such time as behavioural norms can be established.

Regulatory conflicts of interest - lessons for the HSA from SMRT/LTA COI

The recently released findings of the Committee of Inquiry for the SMRT breakdowns has some important lessons for the HSA. Apart from pointing out the lapses in SMRT, it also fingered the failure of the regulator, LTA, in managing the intrinsic conflicts of interest inherent within the workings of the regulator. But the LTA is not alone is this regard. Many, if not all of Singapore's regulatory agencies are stacked full of these conflicts.

The HSA is similarly affected. Gigamole has pointed out these conflicts of interests before. How can a regulator do its job when it has also been tasked with befriending and facilitating growth of the very industry it is supposed to regulate? In some cases, the HSA is itself, also the service provider in the areas where it is supposed to regulate.

 In the recent brouhaha about medical device regulation, the HSA came across looking almost afraid of the industry it is supposed to regulate. Note how very quickly it capitulated to the demands of industrial players. To Gigamole, "regulate with a light touch" really means "I will look the other way while you do your thing. Just don't get into trouble".

In the hurriedly convened "closed" town hall meeting, HSA met up with 370 of the industry players to anxiously reassure them of this "light touch". Conspicuously absent was any representation from any consumer groups. Do patient-consumers not have a voice, and do they not need to be protected? It used to be that we can depend of the Ministry of Health, or its proxy, in the form of a governmental regulatory agency, to have the interests of the public first. But nowadays, this cannot be assumed, because regulators have to be industry friendly, and promote the development of these very industries. And the biomedical industry has become significantly more powerful and insistent of late. The need to "perform" with respect to the Pro-Enterprise Index, speaks volumes.

The LTA had been found wonting because it did not adequately firewall its regulatory functions from the need to also promote. Likewise, Gigamole predicts that it is only a matter of time before the HSA runs into serious problems with major consequences for the patient-consumer if it doesn't make a serious attempt to deconflict these functions.

The Ferrari accident and illegal street racing in Singapore

Gigamole is not the only one in Singapore horrified by the fatal Ferrari accident 4 days ago. Mr Gerard Ee, Chairman of the Public Transport Council seems to have missed the point totally in rejecting what he felt were unfair and harsher calls to restrict high-performance cars in Singapore. But he may be right in that it is not the ownership of the cars that is the problem. It is the irresponsible and reckless behaviour of the car drivers that needs to be reigned in.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that the Ferrari was involved in some sort of street race. Perhaps not in a group, but almost certainly the driver was using the streets of Singapore as his own F1 race circuit. The comment from his wife is quite telling. The deceased Mr Ma was fond of driving his car in the middle of the night because there were few cars on the road.

Illegal street car racing is not unknown in Singapore. Several years ago people and the media were already reporting about it. There are videos on You Tube about it. It is not as if the Traffic Police does not know about it. They were supposed to have cracked down on this.

But no.... illegal street racing has gone on unabated. Read these posts about illegal street racing in the Trip Advisor site for Marina Mandarin Hotel. These posts are as recent as April 2012. So it is public knowledge that this is happening. Can it be that the Traffic Police is unaware of this? Read the post by Frequent Traveller. He called the Police at 3am, and the racing was still going on at 5pm.

So my question is, what the hell has the Traffic Police been doing? Are they really unaware that illegal street racing is going on? That these high-performance cars are tearing up our roads in the wee hours of the morning? Mr Gerard Ee, are you unaware of these illegal street races?

Can it be that the Traffic Police is really aware of these races, but have deliberately turned a blind eye to these races? Why they have done so can only be guessed at. Perhaps it is to allow the rich and irresponsible a place to play their fancy cars? To make Singapore an exciting destination and home for the rich and irresponsible?

The SMRT fiasco - identifying the root causes?

In the midst of the chaos surrounding the Committee of Inquiry proceedings, senior management of the SMRT has of course, very predictably, made all kinds of promises to identify the root cause of what went wrong. Mr Ong Ye Kung, an independent director of the SMRT board has been appointed to do this "root cause analysis".

Fancy words, that sound good. The question is, can they?

The ideas of cause and effect go back a very long time in history. But the concept of root cause analysis can perhaps be traced back in more recent times (about 50 years ago) to when Sakichi Toyoda of Toyota fame, introduced the concept of the 5 Whys in identfying what actually caused something to wrong. The idea of asking whys 5 times to arrive at the root cause was perhaps too simplistic, but at least moved the inquiry beyond just fingering the finger that pulled the trigger, to a more fundamental cause.

Root cause analysis has since then become pretty much an industrial standard of identifying the fundamental causes of any industrial or public health incident. But it is not without its limitations. Dean Gano about 20 years ago pointed out some of the limitations in the cause-effect reasoning. He identified 4 principles of causation that we should take note of :

 1. Causes and effects are the same thing only seen at a different point in time.
 2. Causes and effects are part of an infinite continuum of causes.
 3. Each effect has at least two causes in the form of actions and conditions.
 4. An effect exists only if its causes exist at the same point in time and space.

Points 2 and 3 are particularly useful for us to take note of, i.e. that this whole process is pretty much an infinite continuum, and that apart from the action there are conditions that are involved in causation.

When investigating root cause of any event, the assumptions, prejudices and perspectives of the investigator becomes critically important because they determine the conduct of the investigation and interpretation of the events.

Applied to the SMRT conduct of root cause analysis, we can see that the Chairman did the "right" thing in appointing Mr Ong Ye Kung, an independent director of  the board to lead the investigation. However we should note that Mr Ong, although an independent director, is nevertheless a board member. Can we expect that he will be able to properly identify board related deficiencies? Furthermore, he is a PAP member who was on the teams that wrote the Land Transport White Paper, and  that established the LTA in the first place. How objective will he be in drawing that line of causal continuity back to those original ideas? Certainly the conditions for failure are equally important to the actions/inactions that resulted in the failure.

So I am not holding my breath that they will find the answer. The COI has identified the leads. Here's hoping there will at some point in time, be some real experts who will be capable of a truly independent conduct of the root cause analysis.

The SMRT monster-under-the-bed is emerging......

Day by day as the proceedings of the Committee of Inquiry for the SMRT fiasco plays out in the press, it has become clearer and clearer how big the monster under the Transport Minister's bed really is. This is one big mess. How can it be that the problem of national transport can be privatized to a company that showed such wanton neglect of operational necessities? The long awaited appearance of the beleaguered CEO at the COI really only served to confirm how misplaced the entire SMRT agenda was.  But much as we would like to just hang everything on the pathetic past CEO, Ms Saw, we should not forget she was not the only one responsible for this mess.

She essentially reported to the Chairman of the Board, Mr Koh Yong Guan, an eminent guy, but essentially a money guy. Eyeballing the SMRT 2010 Annual Report, we can see that the priorities of the Board really centred around fiscal prudence and health. Corporate risks were essentially only related to financial risks and not operational risks. Clearly the SMRT mission the Board set out for CEO Saw was really about growing the commercial and financial stature of the organization. Was she incompetent? Obviously not by the evaluations of the SMRT Board. At least not until the claws fell off the track and the poo hit the fans.

But who was behind the Board? Who put all this money people into the Board of an operational unit that was supposed to deliver a world class transport service? And how can it be that the transport regulator LTA can audit the SMRT year after year and find nothing but a bed of roses?

Now of course we know that bed of roses really harboured a huge stinky monster.

But going off on a tangent, as I am wont to do, it should be noted that this SMRT fiasco is really not merely an aberration in an otherwise healthy Singapore. Singapore, notwithstanding all the glowing reports in the mainstream media, is really quite dysfunctional. The sickness comes from the government's fixation on high GDP growth at the expense of everything else. Anything of worth is Singapore is denominated in dollar terms. The SMRT and the transport sector are not the only places where there are grossly misplaced missions. The health sector has been hugely corrupted by the pursuit of the medical dollar at the expense of affordable health care for the public. While lamenting the inadequacy of hospital beds, the Ministry of Health encourages corporatized hospitals to continue to build to cater to high end private patients. Meanwhile the universities chase bloated KPIs that have to do with ranking and research glory, rather than focusing on providing solid and affordable tertiary education for the average Singaporean.

There are monsters hidden under these beds that will, like the SMRT one, eventually emerge one day.

So as we head into the Hougang by-election, here is my plea to the Prime Minister. As a Singaporean I am increasing disillusioned by this overemphasis on wealth and elitist ideals. It is as if Singaporeans are not worthy of consideration and support unless they are megadollar earners. Prime Minister, you are wrong in this. Every Singaporean is worthy of support regardless of whether they are able bodied, able minded or not. Or even if they are just plain not-very-smart.

At this year's National Day Parade, I want to be able to say the pledge and mean it.

The bathtub effect? A Singapore problem.

When Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew was recently pressed on why newer train systems were breaking down, he attributed this to the "bathtub effect". This is a cutesy metaphor that engineers like to use to give the impression that they have a human side, and that they do take baths.... sometimes. Essentially the metaphor refers to the high frequency of breakdowns in machines early during installation, and then again much later in its life cycle. The breakdown frequencies show a bathtub shaped curve.

The early breakdowns are usually due to the operator being relatively naive. The later breakdowns are due to the expected wear and tear when the machine nears the end of its lifecycle.

By referring to the bathtub effect, Minister Lui is essentially telling us that the SMRT had synced the train systems so well that the old system was failing at the same time as the new ones were. The sides of the two bathtubs were in perfect alignment. Well done, guys! You were precise about this, at least.

There is actually another interpretation of the bathtub effect. This is a metaphor used more by environmental scientists. Essentially here, the bathtub represents that container where the water level is determined by the rate of water flowing in and the rate of water draining from it.

The ENV people know this very well as this is the cause of the frequent 'ponding' observed in recent times, during heavy rainfall.

This is actually a more important interpretation of the bathtub effect, because it explains so many of the problems we see in Singapore nowadays. So much of the Singaporean angst, whether it is about housing, transport, healthcare or education is really about the water level in the bathtub. The capacity of these systems are woefully inadequate compared to the demand. So the water overflows from the bathtub.

One can't help wondering why this is so. Considering the 'excellence' of our civil service and that the government has had uninterrupted power for such a long time, it seems a critical neglect that they have gotten the models all so screwed up. Why they did not anticipate the rate of population growth and did not build enough capacity to cater for this growth, I simply cannot understand. Was it because all these scholars were so blind that they did not see the threat of overflow? Or was it that they were all only concerned about short term KPIs? Let the bathtub overflow on someone else's watch! 

So much for a government that claims credit for long term planning. So, thank you Minister Lui for sharing with us this important metaphor. Now we understand why the bathwater is ponding all over the living room floor.

LTA and regulatory capture? HSA are you listening?

A week ago in the Sunday Times Senior Correspondent  Christopher Tan write a nice article about the recent SMRT wayang and the LTA, raising the issue of a regulatory capture occurring between the transport regulator LTA and the transport industry.

The concept of regulatory capture is very much assocated with Economics Nobel Laureate George Stigler. It refers to the type of government failure when a public sector regulator has a cosy cosy relationship with the regulated service provider, to the extent that the regulator becomes a promoter of the regulated rather than a protector of the public needs.

Is the LTA a victim.... or are we, the public, victims of the regulatory capture between LTA and the transport industry.

This is actually not an isolated problem affecting the LTA, but can be seen to exist in many of Singapore's regulators.

The HSA (Health Sciences Authority) for example may be in such a predicament. Formed in the past from all the disparate MOH subunits in the Ministry of Health that the MOH wanted to decant from the Ministry, the functions of the various parts of the HSA range all the way from service provision, regulatory and promotional. Regulatory capture?...certainly many opportunities for this to develop in the HSA. Successive Board Chairmen and CEs have not made any attempt to deconflict all these functions, choosing instead to keep the easy and cosy relationships which made their work easier. However, unless this regulatory captures are dismantled, one has to question to what extent public needs are sacrificed to meed the needs of the industry.

By the way, George Stigler was also well known in medical circles for his attempt to optimize the daily recommended diet. Like all economic solutions, the result was totally unpalatable.

The cyclist vs motorist debate..... why is the LTA silent?

Yesterday's ST carried a surprising and gracious letter from a Mr Damian Evans....apologizing for some bad behaviour as a cyclist. Surprising because apologizing is not something we have come to expect in Singapore society.

Today's ST then followed with a letter from a motorist who was responsible for the incident.

It was an interesting exchange of views, which highlighted one thing for me. Neither was out to cause grief. Yet their encounter on the road resulted in a potential for conflict....or worse, for physical danger to one of them.

A major reason for this I belief is the lack of clarity of what is expected of cyclists' behaviour on the roads. Motorists are generally confused by signals being sent about how cyclists should cycle..... or not cycle. I know cyclist s who firmly believe that when they are on the roads they should cycle in the middle of the left most lane. They believe that this increases their profile and reduces their risk of being forced to the kerb or being hit by a car. To me this is foolhardiness, but this is what they believe. If cycling in a group, I have heard of cyclists being told by their group leaders that they should cycle abreast for the same reason.

Yet this is blatant violation of the law, which is explicit in forbidding cyclists from cycling abreast.

In all this time, the Traffic Police and LTA have been pitifully and disappointingly silent. Should they not come out and say clearly what is allowed and what is not? What is allowable and what not? Why are they so coy about this?

Clarity preempts conflict.... and hopefully will prevent unnecessary accidents.

When they do break their silence, they should also be explicit about what stretches of roads are out of bounds to cyclists....e.g. expressways, semi-expressways, overhead passes etc.