Circle Line MRT to open on May 30th !!

Are you residing in areas such as Lorong Chuan and Bartley Road, then the circle line MRT is just on its way to open on May 30th 2009. Circle Line Stage 3, which has five stations, will open on May 30 instead of June, Transport Minister Raymond Lim announced in Parliament during yesterday's debate on his ministry's budget.
The remaining 24 stations on the new line will open slowly from next year, thereby reducing the crowd in other trains. When completed, the Circle Line will take about 10 to 15 per cent of commuter trips from existing lines. '(It) will help commuters save travel time, by reducing the need to make detours into the city centre to transfer across MRT lines,' said Mr Lim.
The five stations that will open are Marymount, Bishan, Lorong Chuan, Serangoon and Bartley. Bishan will be the interchange station for the North-South line and Serangoon, the North-East line.
The Circle Line is among $40 billion worth of rail projects that will double Singapore's rail network. Besides adding new rail lines, the Transport Ministry is also intent on reducing waiting time along existing lines, which introduced 900 extra train trips a week last year. One major move is the purchase of 22 new trains, to be delivered in 2011. Another is to expand Jurong East MRT station, where there is a bottleneck. Trains arriving there from Bukit Batok now have only one platform and track to stop at before they turn around. A second train will have to wait for the first to leave before it pulls into Jurong East. A project to add another platform and track will be completed by 2011 instead of 2012, said Mr Lim.
The changes to Jurong East station and the new trains will cost $800 million in all. They will help boost carrying capacity along the North-South and East-West lines by 15 per cent and slash the waiting time between trains to two minutes in 2011 from the current 2.1 to 4 minutes.
Yet another project that will come onstream earlier is the extension of the North-South MRT line to Marina South. It will be completed a year earlier, in 2014.
Singapore's trains pack in four people per square metre, which is similar to those in Hong Kong but lower than London's (five people) , Tokyo's (seven) and Shanghai's (eight).