I refer to last Sunday's letter, 'Student paying adult bus fare', by Miss Huang Xinyuan.

SBS Transit operates various types of bus services to cater to specific commuter demands. The majority of these are basic, air-conditioned services, where students pay a concessionary fare of 45 cents by ez-link card, or 55 cents by cash.

Concessionary fares apply only when a valid concession card is presented at the point of boarding, regardless of whether the passenger is a student in or out of uniform.

However, concessionary travel does not apply to non-basic services, such as Nite Owl, Premium, Express and Fast Forward.

Service 502 is an Express service which travels along the expressways to offer commuters a faster journey to their destinations.

As it is not a basic service, concessionary fare is not offered. This is clearly indicated on our website under 'Express services'.

However, this exception was not mentioned on the 'Students/Children fares' page, which then gave rise to some confusion for Miss Huang.

We are sincerely sorry for the inconvenience caused to her as a result of this.

We have since taken immediate action to include this information on the relevant section on our website.

We would also like to apologise to all commuters for any confusion caused.

We thank Miss Huang for her feedback and the opportunity to improve on our services.

We will be getting in touch with her to personally extend our apologies.

Tammy Tan (Ms)
Vice-President
Corporate Communications
SBS Transit

This article was first published in The Straits Times on 4 Jan, 2009.