MRT explained: the rail network, and what counts as a disruption

The first stretch of the Mass Rapid Transit opened in November 1987, between Yio Chu Kang and Toa Payoh. The network now has six lines, and on a working day it carries the majority of the island’s public transport journeys.

Who owns it and who runs it

These are different parties, which is the first thing to get straight when reading any statement about the network. The Land Transport Authority plans the network, builds it and owns the assets. Operation is licensed to operators who run the trains and staff the stations under a contract with performance standards attached. When a line underperforms, the question of who answers for it depends on whether the cause was an asset or its operation.

The six lines

The North-South and East-West lines are the original network and the oldest infrastructure on it. The North East line, opened in 2003, was the first fully automated heavy rail line. The Circle line loops the city fringe rather than crossing it. The Downtown line runs a long diagonal through the centre. The Thomson-East Coast line is the newest, opening in stages from 2020 and adding a second north-south spine.

Light rail systems in several housing estates feed the heavy rail network. They are counted separately in reliability reporting, and their failures are reported against their own scale.

The measure that matters

Rail reliability here is reported as mean distance between delays: how far the fleet travels, on average, between service delays that exceed a threshold. The threshold is five minutes.

Two things follow from that definition, and both are worth holding on to.

First, the measure is a distance, not a count. A year with more service kilometres and the same number of failures reports better. That is deliberate, because it makes a growing network comparable with a smaller one.

Second, delays below the threshold are outside the measure. A month of frequent short holds can coexist with a strong published figure, and passengers describing a line as unreliable are not necessarily contradicting the number. They are measuring something the number does not capture.

Why this page has no live status

Running status for each line is published through an authenticated operator feed, not an open one. Rather than show a status this build cannot verify, the transport board leaves that column explicitly empty and reports what it can source: the network’s composition, and the vehicle quota figures beside it.

For current service information, the authority and the operators are the source of record.