Tag: vehicles

The ways and means of urban transportation have a certain inherent appeal.

Lucky Joint Construction truck

The company is called “Lucky Joint Construction Private Limited”, and it appears to be a well-established construction company. Their website, which is decent, is located at www.luckyjoint.com.sg.

Clearly “joint” has different primary meanings for different people. I don’t think this business name would go over very well in the US.

Ice truck slogans

I’m fascinated by the commercial vehicles in Singapore, especially JM Ice trucks.

J.M. Ice: There’s always a better service!

This bizarre slogan is struggling mightily to convey the message, “Our service is always better!” but unfortunately suggests that “There’s always a better service than ours!”

Iceman: You ring, we bring.

Descriptive, concise, memorable. Could apply to anything being delivered, though.

Tuck Lee: Have ice will revel.

So pithy, clever and downright hip, it’s no wonder they trademarked it! You win, Tuck Lee.

No-boarding and No-alighting Zones

The intent of this phrase is to designate zones in which people are permitted neither to get in a taxi nor to get out of one.

However, I think “no-boarding and no-alighting” is a whopping long phrase to use as an adjective in front of the noun “zones”. It’s so cumbersome that my initial inclination was to read it as an elliptical formation designating two different kinds of zones:

[Be aware of the] no-boarding [zones] and [the] no-alighting zones.

This would be analogous to a sentence like:

If the medium-size shirt doesn’t fit, let me know; there are bigger [sizes] and smaller sizes available.

Obviously there are no sizes each of which is both “bigger and smaller”; the adjectives are separate, and there’s a noun implied but omitted after the first one.

I’m not even sure the intended reading of “no-boarding and no-alighting zones” is syntactically possible, unless you hyphenate the whole thing, which would be ugly and probably violate most style guidelines:

No-boarding-and-no-alighting Zones

Since there’s a set of illustrations below the text, I think probably I would write it as:

No boarding or alighting in these zones.

Or, even shorter:

Do not board or alight in these zones.

You can run but you can’t hide, JM Ice Truck #15

So cute. It’s trying to hide behind that plant, but it doesn’t realize that just because it can’t see me doesn’t mean I can’t see it…

I collect sightings of JM Ice trucks because they’re so colorful. I’ve now seen at least 22 of the 38 or more trucks in the fleet.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen #15, though, and it was sitting still so I got a photo!

I thought usually #37 delivered to Chinatown… Ah well.

Bukit Panjang Light Rail Transit (LRT)

It was my first ride on one of Singapore’s LRT lines. I went from Bukit Panjang Station on the Downtown MRT line to Choa Chu Kang.

The train I was on had one car; the ones going the other way had two. Looking at the trains going the other way, I wasn’t so sure they were trains. There’s one rail under these things, but they’re not monorail trains. They’ve got rubber wheels on either side and they roll on those. So is this thing a train? A bus? Or what?

It felt like a theme park ride, to be honest. The track seemed bendier in the left-right and up-down directions than the MRT lines, but since I don’t look straight out the front of the MRT trains, maybe I’m overestimating how smooth the tracks are. The platforms at the stations, which were sized like the trains, contribute to the theme-park-ride impression.

It kinda freaked me out that the elevated track didn’t really have edges. It looked like we could just plunge right over the side. The vehicle didn’t really go very fast, though.

When I left Choa Chu Kang during rush hour, by taxi, the driver pointed out to me where one of the LRT trains had broken down on the track over the road. I was glad I’d gotten to experience the LRT in working condition.