PUBLISHED ONJanuary 22, 2026 11:55 AMBYSean LerA day after the Land Transport Authority (LTA) said it is resetting the Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) system for buses, the transport regulator announced that it has identified the root cause of the issues affecting the system.
In an update issued on Thursday (Jan 22) evening, the authority said that its engineers and contractors discovered a memory cache build-up in the on-board systems of some buses.
"This disrupted data transmissions between on-board bus systems and the central ETA processing servers, leading to missing bus arrival timings."
About 50 per cent of the bus fleet across all bus operators have been affected.
As part of the restoration process, technicians will need to reconfigure the ETA system and clear the cache on all the affected buses.
Given that there were 5,841 public buses as at the end of 2024, technicians will have to physically service more than 2,900 on-board units.
LTA said that this process is expected to take about four days to complete.
From the start of passenger service on Friday (Jan 23), the ETA system will be switched on to allow testing and stabilisation of operations.
During this period, bus arrival timings will not be fully available or accurate, and commuters may miss arrival timings or timings with longer headway.
However, more than 60 per cent of the bus arrival timings will still be available for commuters from Friday at touchpoints such as the electronic passenger display information systems at bus stops and interchanges, apps like MyTransport.SG and third-party apps such as CityMapper and Google Maps.
LTA said that these should "gradually become less common" as the restoration progresses, assuring commuters that bus services will continue to operate as scheduled and thanked commuters for their patience.
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