We Will See PRC Bus Drivers on SMRT Bus Soon
For the sake of all the Malays, Indians, Caucasians, Eurasians and those Chinese who do not speak Mandarin, I serious hope SMRT do not just train the drivers on the technical and route aspects, but also their English. We already heard lots of complaints regarding foreign workers in service industry being lack of the ability to speak English. And, I can understand the frustration one will get.
I saw the news from Zaobao, in Chinese. It said that SMRT recruited 100 bus drivers from China. In January, 34 of them came to Singapore for training, and they will be on the road as early as April. SMRT has to take this action because they are facing problems hiring local Singaporeans or Malaysians to join as drivers.
The link to the news:
http://www.zaobao.com/special/newspapers/2008/03/xmrb080306e.shtml
Upon reading this, I try to find the news in English version, but I could not find any, not from ST. There is nothing on SMRT website also.
However, I managed to find this piece of news from ST, dated 16th Feb 2008, saying that SBS Transit has started hiring bus drivers from China also. The link is:
http://www.straitstimes.com/Free/Story/STIStory_207116.html
http://www.asiaone.com/News/The%2BStraits%2BTimes/Story/A1Story20080216-49950.html
I think the first thing we have to drill into these PRC drivers would be to keep to the right side of the road and make sure they know which direction to turn, because traffic is the other way round in China if I’m not wrong.
I just hope they come here to make an honest living and not make our roads any more worse than they already are.
True true. PRC drives on the right, while Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand drives on the left