How SMRT is reinventing itself in the age of Grab and Go-Jek – through a startup

Train in Singapore / Photo credit: 123RF

Colin Lim – a transportation guru with a career spanning multiple Singapore government ministries, the Land Transport Authority of Singapore (LTA), IBM, and SMRT – is a proud advocate of his country’s transportation network.

“I’ve been to almost every capital city in the world. I’ve tried their public transport […] Singapore has one of the easiest-to-use public transport systems.” He says this with conviction, as if addressing doubters who point to the spate of train breakdowns in the past.

Lim is an inside man: While working at LTA, he led the implementation of distance-based fares in 2010 that got rid of the penalties that commuters had to pay whenever they transferred from one transport mode to another.

“We camped in our little war room for two nights. At 5 am, we flipped the switch, and every bus, every MRT station, every fare gate could use the new thing. Suddenly, what was in the past quite complex for people, we took away,” he recounts.

Today, Lim is on a similar mission. He’s now the CEO of MobilityX, a transportation startup that began two years ago as an internal project at SMRT – the second-biggest public transport operator in Singapore by revenue. He hopes to reimagine how consumers interact with public transport.

For the project to reach the next level, he needed to spin it off as a separate entity. Unlike corporates that might be bogged down in bureaucracy, startups can make decisions and act on them quickly. So Lim recruited fellow believers and set up the new company, which was wholly owned by SMRT until recently, when it raised money from Toyota Tsusho – a subsidiary of Japanese carmaker Toyota.

One of those believers was Xie Litian, who has a doctorate in transportation. As a former transport planner at LTA, he was involved in data analysis and modeling that shaped Singapore’s transportation network.

In 2013, Xie attended a talk given by the lead for Google’s driverless car program at a US conference. It was an eye-opener: shocked by the pace of change and how fast technology was developing, he decided that he wanted to be a part of it.

Together with the 30 or so employees at MobilityX, Xie now has a chance to do so.

Just what is MobilityX?

The company is doing what’s called mobility-as-a-service (MaaS).

As defined by MaaSLab, a research team within the University College London, MaaS is “a user-centric, intelligent mobility management and distribution system, in which an integrator brings together offerings of multiple mobility service providers, and provides end-users access to them through a digital interface, allowing them to seamlessly plan and pay for mobility.”

It’s a mouthful, but think of it as a Netflix for all transportation options – be it the train, taxi, private-car hire, or bicycle. Suppose you take the bus, then the train, and finally a shared bike to work. Instead of receiving multiple fees, you’ll only pay for a consolidated bill. Or imagine paying a monthly subscription fee that gives discounted rates for a limited number of trips – customizable to your liking.

“A lot more transportation options are coming in, which makes things more complicated for the customer. So we’re trying to simplify that,” notes Xie.

A consumer app with a grand vision

Trains and buses are here to stay