Singaporeans are getting richer, not taking public transport

SMRT announced that it had made the first loss after years of profit making to the tune of $86m in FY2018. Among the reasons given for the loss were “higher maintenance staff costs, parts and material costs, depreciation of rail assets and other rail maintenance related operating expenses.” And another big item, falling ridership.
 
Operating expenses gone up from $785m to $838m or up $53m. Revenue fell from $791m to $743m or down $48m. Squaring these two items would see a loss of $101m ($53m + $48m). To end up with a net loss of $86m would mean that there were profits coming from other non train operations like rentals or extraordinary items.
 
Let’s look at the numbers again. In 2017, revenue($791m) less expenses($785m) should give a profit $6m. Similarly for 2018, revenue($743m) less expenses($838m) should give a loss of $95m. Presumably these numbers did not include other non train operations. But this is not true given the data in the above paragraph that show a difference of $15m ($101-$86m). In 2017, SMRT declared an after tax profit of $26m, thus saying the non train operation profit was $20m. Extrapolating the data, non train operation profit also fell from $20m to $15m.
 
Data can be very confusing indeed.
 
Another interesting number is that SMRT made $81m after tax profit in 2016, $26m after tax profit in 2017 and now $86m loss in 2018. What contributed to the big turnaround in numbers? Falling ridership? High maintenance expenses?
 
What is surprising is the announcement of falling ridership despite the population rising every month and moving towards the 6.9m number. Why the rise in population did not turn into more ridership? Perhaps the new citizens and immigrants were of the rich type, the millionaires or billionaires, so they did not take public transport. But his is unlikely the case given that most of the new arrivals were poor jobless third world type coming here to steal the jobs of citizens. So they were more likely to take public transport than buying private cars that cost a bomb that many Singaporeans too could not afford.
 
Then again this could be untrue and could point to the fact that Singaporeans were getting richer and so could afford private cars and thus no need to take public transport.
 
The other possibility was that the cost of private transport had gone up so much while income fell as more and more Singaporeans became unemployed or underemployed and thus could not afford to take public transport. Thus ridership of public transport like trains fell accordingly.
 
But then again, given the number of happy and contented Singaporeans posting how happy they were with their lives and incomes, I must conclude that more Singaporeans are getting richer and going back to take private transport instead of public transport.
 
Or could it be due to the pervasive influx of bicycle sharing companies that Singaporeans were taking to bicycles or Grabs and Ubers? When one becomes a Grab or Uber one actually has the privilege of owning a private car to move around.
 
What do you think?