Number of Fatalities and Injuries from Falls onto LRT Tracks

Ms Yeo Wan Ling asked asked the Minister for Transport what is the number of fatalities and injuries from falls onto LRT tracks in the past 10 years.

Sir, there were two fatalities and one injury from falls onto Light Rail Transit (LRT) tracks in the past 10 years.

I thank the Senior Minister of State for the answer. As you may know, we had a very tragic incident that occurred at the Punggol Cove LRT station a few weeks ago and our Punggol community is distraught about the loss.

Since 2018, glass panels have been installed at our LRT platforms, but the gap is left where the door should be. The Land Transport Authority (LTA) has told me that there are space and technical constraints on the platform preventing the installation of auto doors. Given that our Punggol LRT stations can be quite crowded during peak hours, especially when children are headed to school, our Punggol residents are very concerned about the safety of commuters, especially children.

Can the Ministry give an update on whether there has been any technical breakthroughs since 2018 on installing doors at the platform and in the case where this is not yet feasible, what additional safety measures can the Ministry implement to prevent commuters from accidental falling into the LRT tracks?

I thank the Member for her supplementary question. I note the concerns of the residents and understandably so. Let me say that, in designing and running our rail network, safety is our highest priority. So, as the Member has noted, since 2018, we have installed fixed barriers at all LRT stations. In addition, we have also installed a line of tactile warning studs along the station platform to warn commuters that they are approaching the edge of the platform.

In addition, there are emergency telephones for commuters to communicate with the stationmasters, as well as emergency stop plungers, which allow commuters to stop the trains in the case of emergency. We have also actually increased the signages and announcements in our LRT stations to remind commuters of safety practices within the station as well as signages to warn people, to remind people, to stay behind the yellow lines.

We had studied – as the Member said – the feasibility of installing platform screen doors at our LRT stations and as she has noted, for LRT stations they have much smaller space than MRT stations and installing platform screen doors require additional space for power communication, signal control rooms and so on. And it is not possible or it will be difficult to accommodate such facilities in every station without substantially affecting the waiting space. And as she has said, sometimes the platform can be quite crowded, so this actually may not improve the safety of our commuters. Nonetheless, let me assure the Member that we will continue to look into the feasibility of platform screen doors taking into account any new technologies that may come into the market.

Let me also say that as an additional safeguard, our public transport operators are looking into technologies like video analytics to provide early alerts should there be a commuter intrusion onto the tracks to provide us more time to intervene.