The students investigated long waiting times for buses around Raffles Institution. They conducted a survey that found most students felt wait times were long and often caused them to be late. The students created a Facebook page and held an exhibition to raise awareness. They gathered over 300 signatures on a petition. They met with MP Josephine Teo and received a letter confirming she would forward their findings to the bus operator to improve services.

1. Raffles Institution
Year 2 Research Education
Design for Change School Challenge 2011
Slow Bus Services
By
Team Leader: Jordan Ng (2M)
Team Members: Leben Chew (2K)
Jovan Chan (2I)
Aaron Chou (2I)
Teacher Mentor: Mrs Ramesh

2. Abstract
The aim of this Design for Change Challenge project is to investigate the waiting times
for buses around Raffles Institution, to find out whether the timings affected the students
negatively, and if so, to make changes to that problem. We contacted our minister, Mrs.
Josephine Teo. We sent our survey findings to her and requested that she assist us in
propelling our project forward. We received a letter that included suggestions so as to
improve our projects, written from her stating that she will be happy to forward our
findings to SBS. As minister of Transport, she also vowed to help us make a change.
Shortly after, we received a phone call from SBS, and answered a few questions
pertaining to the problem. This is good news for us as the survey questions were given
out to students who take the buses around Raffles Institution. The survey results show
that the bus timings were indeed long and do pose a problem for the students who take
them. As such, an action week was planned out to address this issue and hopefully
make lasting changes to this problem.
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3. Acknowledgements
Our project would not have been possible without the help of many people. As such we
would like to acknowledge the help of these people.
Firstly, our teacher-mentor, Mrs Ramesh, for helping us and giving constructive advice
to improve our projects.
We also thank Member of Parliament, Mrs Josephine Teo, for helping to make our
project a success.
Lastly, we also extend our gratitude to the students who helped with our survey,
everyone who came forth to sign our petition and our friends and families for their
support.
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4. Contents:
Title Page ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i
Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ii
Acknowledgements --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- iii
Table of Contents ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- iv
Chapter 1: Introduction ...............................................................................1
Why we chose Design for Change
Our objectives
Chapter 2: Background research …............................................................2
Our survey
Results of our survey
Chapter 3: Our action week ….....................................................................3
Brief description of action plan
Days 1-7
Chapter 4: Discussion ….............................................................................5
Limitations
What we learned
References
Append
Iv
Chapter 1: Introduction

5. We chose to take part in this Design for Change challenge as we were greatly
motivated by the many problems in our society. Like many societies, having problems is
inevitable. It is impossible to have a society with no problems at all. However, we can
still try to reduce the amount of problems as much as possible, and this can be
achieved through the help of each and every one of its citizens. As such, we felt that
this Design for Change challenge was very meaningful and we wanted to make a
change to help improve this problem.
Our project has 2 main objectives, firstly to investigate the waiting times or buses
around Raffles Institution and to gather evidence that these waiting times pose
problems for the students. Lastly, to present our findings to SBS and hope that
improvements will be made.
Public transport is widely used in Singapore. Many people rely on public transport to get
to their destination every day. Therefore it is essential that Singapore’s public transport
system is efficient with little problems to prevent the many people who rely on it from
getting late.
There are many complaints that Singaporeans have about our public transport system,
namely for buses, as there are traffic jams and other complications that make the
waiting times for buses erratic, which can become a major problem in Singapore’s face-
paced society.
We have noticed that the waiting times for buses have been getting more erratic, and
we felt that this may cause students to be late and pose a problem for them. Therefore
we decided to embark on this DFC challenge to hopefully make improvements to this
problem.
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Chapter 2: Background research

6. In order to present our claims to SBS and hope for changes, we must first gather
enough evidence to support our claims. We gathered our evidence through the use of
surveys, which were given out to a group of 60 randomly selected students from Raffles
Institution. The results of our survey gave us information about the bus waiting times,
how students feel about them and whether they pose a problem to them.
Our survey results are as follows. 76.66% of the students feel that the waiting times are
indeed long, with an average time of 12.3 minutes, and the longest times they have
waited averages at 28 minutes, with timings as long as an hour.
As u can see from the pie chart below, these erratic timings have caused a majority of
the students we surveyed to be late at least once, with 41.67% of them being late often.
With this information, we decided to embark on our action week.
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Chapter 3: Our action week

7. Our action week consists of seven non-consecutive days of activities, with each day
consisting of a few hours’ worth of activities
Our action plan went like this; we would, on the first day, create a Facebook page on
the service of SBS buses outside our school, and raise awareness about this issue.
Next, we would spend the allocated 3 days on publicity, as well as to inform them about
the methods we are going to use to solve the problem. Following that, we would spend
two days gathering signatures for our petition. Ultimately, we spent the last day talking
to Mrs. Josephine Teo, the Minister of Finance and Transport.
We started off by each linked our individual pages to the Facebook page, and
recommended it to people. This allowed us to gain more likes and support. We also
have been regularly updating the page with questions and posts about our project.
For the next three days, we held a joint exhibition along with all the other DFC groups in
Raffles Institution. The exhibition was held at the main atrium and many students and
teachers came down to take a look at our posters and learn more about the various
topics we are focusing on. On our poster, we had added a petition and many students
and teachers did come forth to take a look at our poster and sign our petition. These
days were spent in a rotating shift, with different members of the team tending to our
poster each day.
For another two days, our petition was given to our individual classes, namely; 2M, 2K
and 2I, as well as our own friends. in addition, we also spent time going around school
and approaching several students to explain our project to them, and proceeded to ask
them to sign on our petition to help support our cause. over the course of these 2 days
as well as the 3 days the petition was put on the poster, we managed to attain over 300
signatures on our petition.
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8. On the last day of our action week, we made use of the ‘Meet the People’ sessions held
every Tuesday night to approach the MP of Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC, Mrs Josephine
Teo. We presented our our findings to her and requested of her that she assist us in
propelling our project forward. A few days later, we received a letter written from her
stating that she will be happy to forward our findings to SBS for their use in planning
service improvements. (Appendix A) This is good news for us as it means we are now
one step closer to achieving our goal of improving the waiting times of buses around our
school.
Chapter 4: Discussion

9. Throughout the course of this project, we had faced many difficulties and limitations.
The first of which we would like to share was that on 16th August, the day of the ‘Meet
the People’ session, the Member of Parliament, Mrs Josephine Teo, was late and did
not turn up for the session. So we solved this by handing our letter to one of the staff,
which then proceeded to pass our letter to the MP on our behalf.
Another problem we faced was that when we left our petition on our poster or when we
passed students the petition to sign, they did not sign properly. We solved this problem
being around to make sure they sign properly and not just leave the petition unattended.
We also faced the problem of being unable to arrange times to meet up, especially
during events in our action week, such as the days of the exhibition or the ‘Meet the
People’ session. This was largely because we had CCAs and other activities on
different days of the week and there was not a day where we were all free. Although this
problem could not be fully solved, we managed to get past it by making the necessary
sacrifices, to find days where we were allowed by the respective people in charge to
miss CCA or the activity and take time off to meet up. This taught us that we had to get
our priorities straight, as many a time we can’t always get what we want.
During the course of this Design for Change challenge, we are happy to say that we
fulfilled all our objectives. This project allowed us to understand the dynamics of
petitioning and about how to bring about change. We feel that it was a great opportunity
for us to learn about serving the community, and being able to bring a change that can
affect us. At the beginning of this project, it seemed quite daunting to think that we, 4
normal secondary 2 students, are going to bring about a positive change in our society.
But however, after brainstorming for ideas and taking this project step by step, we have
actually came a long way. As long as we believed that ‘I can’ make a change, we could
do it. The first step was always the most difficult, but once we found our footing, we
were able to accomplish our goals.
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Appendix A -

10. Letter from Member of Parliament, Mrs Josephine Teo (scanned)