SIEMENS

Traffic cops in Bangkok carry special scissors to cut the umbilical chords of the hundreds of babies born on the city’s streets every year to women who go into labor on their way to the hospital. That’s no surprise, given the „notoriously congested streets“, of the Thai capital. Millions of cars creep along bumper-to-bumper on roads that were once canals. They are joined by tuk-tuks, or auto rickshaws, and motorcycle taxis that weave in and out of the endless lines of cars.

If not for public transport, the traffic system would have collapsed a long time ago. There are seven million registered vehicles here in an area with a population of 11 million people. One factor that helps prevent the worst-case scenario is the Skytrain. It was completed by Siemens in 1998 and runs above the congested streets on a viaduct whose height ranges from 12 to 30 meters. During rush hours the Syktrain, a Bangkok landmark, operates at two-minute intervals. Every day it carries some 600,000 passengers along two lines that run from downtown Bangkok to the north, southeast, and southwest, providing service to 32 stations. Siemens is now building 35 new cars for the Skytrain.

The economies of major Asian cities such as Bangkok and the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, are growing annually by around six percent, which puts them among the continent’s economic powerhouses. But there’s a downside. Although the average speed of Bangkok’s downtown traffic, taking buses, cars, mopeds and taxis into account, has risen from less than ten kilometers per hour at peak times in 1998 to 18 kilometers per hour today, that is still painfully slow. And it may get worse given that the World Bank predicts a 60 percent increase in the number of Thais living in urban areas by 2050.

“We need fast and reliable public transport with low fuel consumption in order to protect the environment more effectively and improve our quality of life,” says Teerachon Manomaiphibul, Deputy Governor of Bangkok. “Our goal is to increase the use of public transport from its current level of 40 percent to 60 percent by 2021.” With this in mind, the city’s traffic planners developed the “Bangkok Mass Transit Development Plan” back in 1994. The plan includes more than a dozen new subway and rapid rail lines, some of which are to run along the heavily traveled Sukhumvit and Silom Roads in order to reduce their congestion. The plan has repeatedly been revised, but its basic approach remains the same.

The plan’s first major achievement was the Skytrain. Siemens has operated in Thailand for 110 years, and is now not just a supplier, but a partner with over 1,200 employees, 400 of whom are responsible for assembling and servicing Bangkok’s trains. Siemens was also awarded the contract for Bangkok’s first subway, the Blue Line, which was completed in 2004 after only 28 months of cooperation with a Thai construction company. The line, which carries 210,000 passengers a day, runs in a semicircle under the most congested traffic arteries. Building it was no easy task, because Bangkok lies in a depression along the Chao Phraya River. “Engineers had to ensure that no water could enter the tunnel, especially during the rainy season,” says rail expert Katrat Upayokin, who manages Siemens Rail Systems in Bangkok. Siemens also built Bangkok’s Airport Rail Link, which was completed in 2010. The line’s climate-controlled cars carry 45,000 passengers per day between the downtown area and Suvarnabhumi Airport 28 kilometers away. All three Bangkok rail lines connect at several stations, which makes transfers fast and simple. Such public transport projects are helping the city expand its infrastructure to keep up with rapid growth.

The city’s transport network is still growing. For example, an additional eight billion euros is pegged for expansion over the next four years. The network will eventually have up to ten lines and its total length will more than double. The current master plan calls for 18 new lines to be built by 2029. Some of these routes will lead directly from the city center to its outskirts, while others will run in a ring around the center. “If everything goes as planned, Bangkok will have one of the best local public transport systems in Asia,” says Marc Ludwig, Head of Sales Asia-Pacific in Siemens’ Mobility and Logistics Division.

Kuala Lumpur: Major Rail Expansion. Siemens is not only an important business partner of the city; it’s also a good corporate citizen. For example, during the heavy floods of November 2011 Siemens employees helped to prevent the city from sinking into chaos by keeping the rail systems running smoothly. These staff members remained on call, ready to go into action if the capital had to be evacuated. At the moment, Siemens is supporting the Thai government with its effort to develop curricula for train engineering programs at the country’s leading universities. “Our contractual partners in Bangkok are always very interested in our advice,” says Mathias Becker, Head of Sales in Thailand. “They’re mainly concerned with technical issues, of course, but they also ask us about our experience with transport planning.”

Bangkok’s three successful rail lines make it a model for other cities in Asia, including Kuala Lumpur. In the early 1980s over one third of all trips in Kuala Lumpur were taken using trains, buses, or taxis. Today, public transport only accounts for 20 percent of all journeys in the city. “This is partly due to the government’s large subsidies to the Malaysian auto industry, especially the Proton brand. Interest didn’t focus on local public transport until recently,” says Shariman Zain Yusuf from Siemens Mobility and Logistics in Malaysia. Today every household in Kuala Lumpur has two vehicles on average, which is almost as many as in the United States. “But there is no room for new roads, so we desperately need to invest extensively in local public transport,” adds Yusuf.

In 1998 Kuala Lumpur built two automated urban rail lines for the Commonwealth Games. The Kelana Jaya Line runs from east to south, and the Ampang Line runs from north to east. However, no other lines have been built since 1998 except for the KL Monorail and the Express Rail Link (ERL) to Kuala Lumpur International Airport. As a result, the city of 1.6 million people (plus four million in the region) has the lowest number of track kilometers per inhabitant in Asia.

As in Bangkok, permanent traffic congestion in Kuala Lumpur has produced an urgent need for the public transport network to be significantly expanded. Rail lines will form the backbone of the transportation system. A draft proposal of the Malaysian government calls for more than 100 kilometers of new subway lines to be built by 2020 to link the city center with the suburbs. The rail system will include cutting-edge driverless trains. In 2012 Kuala Lumpur’s Mass Rapid Transit Corporation ordered 58 Inspiro trains from Siemens and commissioned the company to construct two depots. By 2016 these trains will begin operating on a new 51-kilometer route connecting the northwestern and southeastern parts of the city. The order is part of a major infrastructure plan to reduce transport congestion and pollution in the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area.

Although the technology still isn’t very common in North America, driverless subway trains are already operating in European cities such as Nuremberg, Paris, Lille, and Oslo. Such trains offer a big advantage in that they can run at shorter intervals, transport more passengers, and are cost-efficient. “When you build a new transport system from the ground up as Kuala Lumpur is doing, you want to have state-of-the-art technology,” Yusuf says. “Naturally, people also have to accept and use the system, and that requires them to change old habits. But I’m confident that this will happen, because inhabitants have accepted the lines that have been built so far. Nobody likes sitting in traffic for hours.”