The MRT extension, one month on
Riders, revenue and whether the new line has done what it promised.
New infrastructure gets two moments of attention: the day it opens, and the day something goes wrong with it. This episode takes the more useful third look, a month in, once the novelty has worn off and the habits have formed.
The question is not whether the line works — it does — but what it has moved. Journeys that used to be a bus and a wait are now a single ride, and the neighbourhoods at either end of that change are already different places at eight in the morning.
There is time spent on the stations themselves, which are the part nobody photographs: the interchange that works, the one that plainly does not, and the walk between platforms that is longer than the map suggests.
It closes on the argument that follows every extension, about who pays and who benefits, and why the two are so rarely the same group of people. No conclusion is offered. A month is too early, and the episode says so.
