THE authorities are mulling over ways to persuade public transport commuters to travel during non-peak hours, so as to reduce bunching of services, crowding and congestion associated with morning and evening rush hours.
The Straits Times understands that the Land Transport Authority (LTA) is looking in particular at a proposal by academic Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University.
Prof Balaji worked on a scheme in Bangalore between October 2008 and April 2009, where 14,000 commuters – largely those working for IT firm Infosys Technologies – were given incentives to leave for work earlier in the morning.
Employees earned credits according to how much earlier they were, and the credits entitled them to lucky draws with prizes of between 500 and 12,000 rupees (S$330).
Each week, 96,000 rupees were set aside, an amount roughly equivalent to the fuel that buses waste in rush-hour traffic jams.
The plan doubled the number of offpeak commuters.
In an interview with The Economist recently, Prof Balaji said this type of scheme is based on a principle of behavioural economics that says that people are rarely motivated by small rewards – say, a 10-cent fare discount. But they will be moved if there is a fair chance of winning $100 a week.
A scheme put in place by train operator SMRT way back in 1997 seems to bear this theory out.
Commuters who exit at a station within the city area before 7.30am from Mondays to Saturdays were given a 10-cent discount. SMRT said it did this to encourage off-peak travel.
It followed this up with a breakfast coupon that entitled early travellers to discounts of 10 to 50 per cent at selected outlets. But it discontinued the scheme after only two months.
SMRT admitted yesterday the impact of the initiative was ‘slight’, but added that it will continue to explore differential pricing to encourage change in commuters’ travel patterns.
Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew said recently on his Facebook page that such a plan was ‘not a bad idea’.
‘We can certainly ask SMRT to ponder over it,’ he added.
Dr Lim Wee Kiak, former chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee on Transport, was one proponent of ways to flatten peak-hour travel volumes.
His successor, Mr Cedric Foo, said yesterday that he was ‘encouraged’ that the LTA was studying such a scheme.
‘But it is not just a transport issue,’ he said.
‘Employers, schools will have to stagger starting times.
‘Or even stagger school holidays – but there will be trade-offs, because it will be hard for families to travel together.’
SBS Transit, which told The Straits Times it was in talks with the LTA on ways to ‘even out commuter demand’, noted that ‘peak-hour demand is a function of many factors, including office and school hours’.
‘As a public transport operator, we are all for any campaign which can help relieve peak traffic flow,’ SBS Transit spokesman Tammy Tan added.
Transport researcher Lee Der Horng of the National University of Singapore described the scheme as ‘interesting’.
When contacted, the LTA said it was still studying Prof Balaji’s proposal, and nothing had been decided yet.
The concept of spreading out peak demand is not entirely alien to the LTA, though. Singapore’s road-pricing scheme aims to achieve that.
Prof Balaji declined to say more about his scheme except that ‘the proposal is still being fleshed out and the details aren’t yet finalised’.