Doors now up at all MRT platforms

$126m project to install safety feature completed three months early

By Goh Chin Lian, The Straits Times, 15 Mar 2012

ALL 36 above-ground MRT stations now have screen doors preventing passengers from falling off platforms onto the train tracks.

Kranji station was the last such station to have these doors installed and put in operation yesterday.

These half-height screen doors open only when a train has pulled into a station; all underground stations have full-height doors as a matter of course.

The $126 million project to install the 1,920 doors, started in 2009, has been completed three months ahead of schedule, even though the Land Transport Authority (LTA) had warned that the going would be slow because work could be done only between 1.30am and 4am, after the end of train services.

An LTA spokesman said, however, that the 43 LRT stations in Bukit Panjang, Sengkang and Punggol will not have these half-height screen doors installed because of operational challenges.

'As LRT systems are driverless and unmanned, they are far more challenging and complex to operate with half-height platform screen doors, compared with above-ground MRT stations,' he said.

In any case, the number of instances in which commuters fall onto LRT tracks - either accidentally or deliberately - is relatively low, he said.

There were five such cases in LRT stations in 2010 and two last year, against 11 at MRT stations in 2010 and five last year. The LTA is monitoring the situation and will work with public transport operators to explore other options to reduce such 'track intrusions', he added.

Before the LTA began installing the doors on platforms, there had been a spate of falls onto tracks, each of which disrupted train services. The number of cases rose from 16 each in 2004 and 2005 to 30 in 2006 and 31 in 2007.

Most of these falls were intentional - commuters who were suicidal or who wanted to retrieve fallen items; the remaining commuters either lost their balance or passed out while on the platform.

The authorities initially refused to install the doors despite calls from the public, citing costs that commuters would have to bear in the form of higher fares.

But in 2008, the LTA said costs had fallen by a quarter, and transit systems worldwide were installing the doors.

The screen doors have since become a medium of advertising, generating revenue for train operator SMRT.

In a high-profile incident, Thai teenager Nitcharee Peneakchanasak, 15, had both her legs amputated after she fell onto the tracks at Ang Mo Kio MRT station last April.

The lawyer representing the teenager was reported last month to have named the LTA as a party in her suit against SMRT for $3.5 million in medical bills and the cost of prosthetic limbs, because he claimed the defence filed by SMRT included the assertion that it was not the one building the screen doors.

The LTA spokesman told The Straits Times yesterday that no track intrusions had occurred where half-height doors have been installed.