[sustran] Re: Rail or bus

Jain Alok ajain at kcrc.com
Wed May 5 12:20:42 JST 2004


Dear Karl,

Taking a few comparisons from your previous mail, and checking BTS website
for latest ticketing offered, I can summarise the following:

Minimum fare for short-distance travel:

BMTA air-con buses: 8 baht
Microbuses: 20 baht
Skytrain: 10 baht

Obviously, microbuses would be more expensive for short-distance whereas
BMTA a/c buses and Skytrain are comparable.

Fares for Long-distance travel:

BMTA air-con buses: 18 baht
Microbuses: 20 baht
Skytrain: 40 baht (although with multiple trip ticket, this could be reduced
to 18-25 baht)

Yes, skytrain is more expensive than microbuses and BMTA buses when you
consider published single journey fare but for regular users the fares are
not that different.

Apart from different ways of looking at figures, I guess we share the same
view with respect to Bangkok.

Regards
Alok
-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Fjellstrom [mailto:karl at dnet.net.id]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 1:02 PM
To: 'Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport'
Subject: [sustran] Re: Rail or bus


Dear Alok,

Thanks for the thoughtful note. Appreciate the chance to bounce ideas
around, just as a way to learn and not to advocate a particular approach.
Actually there's a lot to reply to, including your observations of Bogota
(you're right, in many ways it has all the advantages of a metro rail system
like high capacity, express routes, exclusive ROW, trunk & feeders, but
without the main disadvantages of cost and construction time), but for now
I'll just reply on your notes on Bangkok.

I think there is an inaccuracy in your point 3 and 4 below where you
indicate private sector air con bus services, and informal sector servcies
(primarily a/c minivans) have a 'price comparable to the skytrain'. If this
were true, then you may be right in some senses that "There is hardly any
difference between 3, 4 and skytrain services." But according to my
information this isn't true and so the argument doesn't hold.....

Firstly: for private a/c services there is a fleet of 800 or so microbuses
charging a flat 20 baht. But they have very long routes, I don't know
exactly but probably more than 20 or 30km avg. And people tend to use them
for long rather than short trips. Sometimes even shorter trips by the
skytrain would cost double (40 baht). And there are the private a/c buses,
around 700 in Jan-03 but rapidly growing. These charge from 8 to 18 baht
depending on distance. Again, average routes are long (around 30km!) but a
normal fare for a city trip up to 8km is 8 baht. A similar distance on the
skytrain is at least triple or quadruple this. It's a similar story for the
BMTA (state operator) air con buses, of which there are around 2000. These
charge from 12 to 22 baht depending on distance but for the first 8km it's
12 baht, well under half the price of a comparable trip on the skytrain.
(Though in all cases for very short trips of course there is much less price
difference, as the minimum, 1-station skytrain fare is 10 baht.)

Secondly: for the minivans, it's 10 to 43 baht depending on distance, but
they tend to have even longer routes, serving outer suburbs. So as well as
being much cheaper than the skytrain on a per km basis they also enable less
transfers (hence further savings) than would be required if they were forced
to use the skytrain for part of the trip.

Just one note to add about the 'financiers' and 'bottomline' which you
mention. KfW, a major financier of the system, recently wrote off a huge
chunk of debt owed by the skytrain operator, since the operator cannot pay
back the loan and is struggling just to make the interest payments.
Ridership now of 300,000+ in 2004 is great, except perhaps when we consider
the 1996 projections were for 900,000+ and even the revised projections
following the economic crash in '97 were 600,000+ *during the first year of
system opening* (back in late '99), with projections for further rapid
growth after that.

I'm not against the skytrain and I think it's a wonderful service for an
important wealthy sector of the market. I think it also helps raise the
image of transit in Bangkok. And much more should have been done to better
integrate the formal bus services. (This could have preempted the explosion
in informal services.) But I am a leery of some of the inflated claims made
(often by those with a very strongly vested interest) in using public funds
to further expand the skytrain network - or develop other metro rail lines -
without even considering alernatives.

Best rgds, Karl

This email and any attachment to it may contain confidential or proprietary
information that are intended solely for the person / entity to whom it was
originally addressed.  If you are not the intended recipient, any
disclosure, copying, distributing or any action taken or omitted to be taken
in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. 
Internet communications cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as
information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, arrive late or contain
viruses.  The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or
omissions in the context of this message which arise as a result of
transmission over the Internet. 
No opinions contained herein shall be construed as being a formal disclosure
or commitment of the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation unless specifically
so stated. 


More information about the Sustran-discuss mailing list