With the dust settling on Tuesday's peak hour breakdown of both the North-South Line as well as East-West Line, I was just thinking if public transport operators (PTOs) make good investments. With the calls to make SMRT private, reducing train fares and the possible $50 million fine slapped on SMRT for the recent disruption, I'm not so sure any more, so this is just going to be a brief analysis of the 2 main public transport operators: SBS and SMRT, focusing largely on their profits instead of overall health (balance sheet, cash flow, etc.) Just looking at the P/E ratios already seems scary. The P/E ratio of SMRT and SBS Transit are 24 and 34 respectively. While PTOs have stable and predictable income stream, however with the recent breakdowns and introduction of hefty fines, there needs to be a larger margin of ......