Basket.

I will commemorate the day World War Two ended in Europe in advance, lest I forget tommorrow. It will be exactly sixty years since the Third Reich crumbled amidst the rubble and corpses of a Berlin Adolf Hitler intended to make capital of a thousand-year empire. But the greatest conflict mankind has yet seen was not to end until three months and hundreds of thousands of lives later.

To return to the present, I ventured into town again today, this time to catch Kingdom of Heaven with a fresh-off-the-fastcraft Jason. I was promptly confronted with the unpleasant fact that the already-high cost of living is rising and will most probably rise yet more in the near future.

Cinema tickets at $9.50 each is outrageous. So is the price of food in most places. But what really makes my blood boil is the proposed public transport fare hikes. The last hikes were when exactly? Two years ago. SMRT and SBS Transit have had the magnanimity not to raise fares for all of two (2!) fucking years. A whole two years! They are really too kind.

Of course, I think such a proposal is ridiculous and if the PTC has any concern at all for the common Singaporean, it will turn this down flat and chastise our august public transport operators for having not one iota of empathy for the man/woman in the street. Unfortunately, I am also old enough to no longer believe in fairy tales. To call the PTC a regulatory body would be to misuse the term - I cannot recall a single instance when it has turned down SMRT or SBS Transit's requests. Despite ferocious public opposition and some of the fiercest debates ever seen in independent Singapore's normally tepid Parliament, the last round of fare hikes went through without a hitch. There is no reason to suppose this round won't either.

This action by our public transport operators is nothing short of bald misuse of monopoly power. No other firms in Singapore can provide what they provide, and they know it. If fares were fifty dollars a ride, plenty of Singaporeans would still have to take the MRT. As such, they have immense power over our lives, and they are choosing to wield it now even as the PTC, designed to prevent the abuse of such power, plays the obedient lapdog. In a pathetic attempt to cloak their money-grubbing motives, the same old tired excuses are wheeled out again - the fare increases are necessary because of higher diesel prices, and better service will be provided. Oh, come now - with the amount I'm already paying, I expect no less than bus drivers prostrate and kissing the feet of every passenger as they board, complemented by a harem of nubile dancing maidens serving up the finest delicacies of the Orient on every bus. Last I checked (which was... wow, today!), that hasn't happened. As things are, the bus drivers don't even deign us with a curt greeting.

And I'm not asking for that. I could not give less of a fuck how the bus driver treats me. What I am asking for is a public transport service that gets me from point to point efficiently with cost-effective prices. Our bus and MRT services have done the first point reasonably well enough by my admittedly-low standards (though I still wonder at the point of bus timetables; the next time I see a bus arrive at the times displayed will be the first) - but they have not done it at the prices I feel are reasonable.

The fare hikes are even harder to justify from a humanist point of view when one considers that both public transport operators made record profits of more than $100 million last year, and up to $10 million from their bus and MRT services alone. And they did this despite higher oil prices. PTC ahs promised to look at it - but, curiously, they say they will only look at the profit both operators have made from their provision of public transport. This strikes me as making no sense whatsoever - why make the distinction when it is the overall profit that matters to the two firms? It is a sign that the PTC is going to play the lapdog and approve the fare hikes, then roll over and let its two masters and the government scratch its belly and give it a biscuit treat.

And the government was just that day speaking of improving the lot of the Singapore worker. If they are sincere about it (which I doubt), it is very simple - nationalise the provision of public transport and hold fees low. There is no need for the bells and whistles of silly and complicated schemes like New Singapore Shares.