the novelty of the line has not worn off, although after three days the glitches are starting to annoy me already. as cindy said, a 8billion dollar system ought to be a little more reliable than it is now. not that i've had any major problems so far. twice i had announced delays at dhoby ghaut and at potong pasir, although they were for less than a minute each, and that was fine - 1 min is negligible, and we've all been warned. but yesterday when i came down the escalator at dhoby ghaut i was appalled to find the screen displaying: punggol next train 22 mins. wtf. no bus, no train on the mrt would ever take 22 bloody mins to come. well, in this case they fixed the problem very quickly, because 2 minutes later the display leapt to 10mins, and then another minute later the train pulled up, so yes, it was the regular 4-6 min wait. but that curse that rose instantly inside me showed me clearly enough - i was smacked with the possibility that you could get onto the nel because you want to get somewhere quickly and be stuck waiting for up to 22mins. 22! i'm still rattled to think - how the hell can a 8 billion dollar system justifying this?

also i made a connection for the first time at dhoby ghaut, and was very pleased until i took the escalator tthe familiar old north-south platform. and then my instant thought was - the old north-south line can't handle the increased passenger volume that the nel is feeding into dhoby ghaut. i've never even seen this sort of crowd at cityhall or raffles place, although perhaps it's only because the nel is new and people are waiting to try it out. still. the northeast corridor is densely populated, and for 10 years we've been clogging serangoon road instead, and now we're all underground. how can the north-south line handle the traffic? i managed to squeeze onto the second train to orchard, but i was discomfited. and no one need mention the disparity between the dhoby ghaut nel section and the mrt section. there's no question about it - the nel stations are gorgeous and modern, and a rapid comfortable ride to town is a convenience no northeasterner who has ever travelled on serangoon road would speak lightly of. we're so much the better off for it. and give it 3 months, sure. but this disgruntlement won't go away, until the glitches can be smoothed out, if they ever can be. otherwise we'll keep asking - 3 years down the road - why didn't they keep the station design, the improvements, the lines, but have the usual sort of trains then? why not, as cindy says, wait till the technology catches up with us, or us with it?