The RTS Link Effect: Researching Cross-Border Spending Before the JB Train Changes Everything
I drove up to a mall car park in Johor Bahru on a Saturday in March and could not find a lot. Not because the mall was full of Johoreans. Roughly three cars in four wore Singapore plates, boots open, uncles loading flats of eggs and toilet roll. Two kilometres east, if you looked up, the concrete viaduct of the RTS Link already ran clean across the strait, finished, waiting for track and trains. That image sat with me for the drive home, stuck in the Causeway queue with everyone else.
Here is the number that made me pull over my thinking. Last year 245 million travellers crossed Singapore's checkpoints, a record, and about three-quarters of them went overland to Malaysia, according to the ICA figures reported by the South China Morning Post. I read that twice, because it works out to roughly 670,000 crossings a day. The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority also cleared 84.8 million vehicles, up 9.5 per cent on the year before (vehicles alone, before you add the bus and rail crowds). Most of that movement is rationed right now by exactly one thing. The jam.
And here is the tension worth sitting with. The jam is not a flaw in cross-border spending. It is the price of it. Every weekend run to Johor Bahru costs you an hour, maybe three, of sitting on the bridge, and that cost is what keeps the trip occasional for most Singaporeans. Take the jam away and you have not made the same trip cheaper. You have changed what kind of trip it is. That, I think, is what retailers, mall operators, and F&B brands on both sides should be researching now, in the window before the train runs, rather than reconstructing it from the wreckage afterward.
What the RTS Link actually is, in numbers that matter
The Johor Bahru to Singapore Rapid Transit System Link is a four-kilometre shuttle between two stations, Bukit Chagar in Johor Bahru and Woodlands North on the Singapore side, where it meets the Thomson-East Coast MRT line. The Land Transport Authority factsheet puts the journey at about five minutes, with peak capacity of up to 10,000 passengers an hour in each direction (that is the peak, not the all-day average). Five minutes. I checked that against the factsheet twice because it reframes the whole question. The current median crossing, once you count the queue, the walk, the stamping, and the queue again, is not five minutes. It is closer to an afternoon.
On timing, the public target has held. Trials were reported to begin in December 2025 without passengers, with the project at 65 per cent of systems and operational works, still aimed at completion by the end of December 2026 and passenger service from early 2027. Call it eighteen months from where I am writing (give or take a slipping deadline or two), though I would not bet a lease on the exact week. The direction is not in doubt even if the date wobbles.
Translate 10,000 an hour each way into something you can feel. That is tens of thousands of people a day who cross without ever touching the jam, without a car, without the tank rule, without the Saturday morning calculus of when to leave (before seven, or forget it). The friction that has quietly priced cross-border spending for a generation does not get reduced. For train users it gets deleted. When you delete a cost that large, demand does not nudge. It re-routes.
Why five minutes changes the maths
Think about how a Woodlands family currently decides on a Johor Bahru run. The saving on groceries, petrol, a haircut, and lunch has to clear a mental hurdle: is it worth the bridge today? For a big monthly stock-up, yes. For a Tuesday top-up or a routine dental cleaning, almost never, because the queue eats the saving whole. The jam is a filter that only lets high-value trips through. The train removes the filter.
You might expect the strengthening ringgit to work against all this, and I did too, at first. The Malaysian ringgit went from around RM3.50 to the Singapore dollar in January 2024 to about RM3.19 by late November 2025 (a swing of roughly 9 per cent against the trip), which on paper makes Johor Bahru a worse deal. Actually, let me correct the instinct there, because the data pushed back. Malay Mail reported crossings staying strong through that entire move, with Johor hoteliers still describing Singapore demand as resilient. If a 9 per cent swing in the exchange rate did not slow the flow, price was never the main lever. Convenience was. And convenience is precisely what a five-minute train hands over for free.
So the honest framing is not "cheaper Malaysia pulls Singapore spending." It is closer to this: the trip is governed by time, and the train collapses the time. That is a different research question, and it is the one that so often gets missed when Singapore consumer research relies on stated intent. People will tell you the exchange rate drives them. Their feet say otherwise.
Who is exposed, and in which direction
When I try to sort out who should care, the businesses split into three groups. I have been calling them the Leakers, the Catchers, and the Two-Way Brands, and I am not certain those names survive the next project, but the grouping has held up across a few conversations.
Three Ways the RTS Link Redraws the Map
The Leakers
Singapore businesses whose customers can suddenly cross in minutes. Everyday grocery baskets, health and beauty, casual dining near the north, plus routine dental, optical, gym, and salon visits that were never worth the queue before.
SG-side grocery, services, casual F&BThe Catchers
Johor businesses and malls near Bukit Chagar positioned to absorb the new inflow, and, less discussed, the reverse trickle of Johoreans who can now reach Woodlands and the Thomson line without a car.
Bukit Chagar retail, JB dental, hypermarketsThe Two-Way Brands
Chains operating on both sides of the strait that must now decide where a store belongs and how to price across a currency line. A southbound coffee chain and a northbound grocer face the mirror image of the same call.
Cross-border chains, grocers, F&B franchisesThe Leakers are the group I would worry about first, because their exposure is easy to underrate. A Woodlands grocer like NTUC FairPrice does not lose a whole basket to Johor Bahru. It loses the predictable, high-volume, low-margin part (the rice, the detergent, the flats of canned drinks), while keeping the forgotten-item dash. That partial loss is harder to see in the numbers than a clean defection, which is exactly why it goes unmeasured until it compounds. We watched a version of this occasion-splitting in how Singaporeans actually use food delivery platforms, where the same person behaves like three different customers depending on the moment.
The Catchers have the happier problem. My first instinct was to file them as the easy winners, but that is not quite right, because proximity hands a mall a new kind of shopper, not simply more of the old one. Nearness to Bukit Chagar is about to become a retail feature, and the malls that read the new catchment first will price and merchandise for a shopper who arrives on foot, in minutes, possibly on a weekday evening (a weekday shopper on a different clock). That is not the same shopper the current car-borne weekend crowd represents, and assuming they are identical is the sort of error that our Singapore consumer intelligence matrix was built to catch.
The demand signals already showing up
None of this is speculation dressed as foresight. The signals are already legible if you go looking. Singapore's own retail base is soft, which raises the stakes for any leakage: SingStat reported retail sales up just 2.7 per cent in December 2025 year on year, and only 1.7 per cent once you strip out motor vehicles, with food and beverage services up a thin 0.7 per cent (barely moving). When your home market is growing at low single digits, a new channel that quietly siphons even a few points of grocery and dining volume is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a good year and a review of your store network.
The two-way traffic is visible too, and coffee is the clearest tell. ZUS Coffee, the Malaysian chain that overtook Starbucks at home and is pushing nearly 200 new stores across Southeast Asia, is already opening cafes in Singapore (four so far, with more announced). Brands are not waiting for the train to decide where the border sits. This is the same cross-border brand movement Felicia discussed in the SCMP, and it rhymes with what we keep finding about local coffee loyalty in our research on what Singapore coffee drinkers actually want: the daily cup is a habit anchored to a route, and the RTS Link rewrites routes.
Put the pieces together and a picture forms, though I hold it loosely. A soft home retail market, a stubborn cross-border flow that shrugged off currency, and brands already staking ground on both sides. The train does not create the demand. It removes the last thing holding it in place.
What a survey will tell you, and why it will mislead
Here is where I want to slow anyone down who is about to commission a quick survey on this. Ask Singaporeans whether they will shop in Johor Bahru more once the train opens, and a large majority will say yes, probably weekly. That answer is close to useless, and not because people lie. They answer the question they hear, which is "do you like the idea of easy Johor Bahru access," and the honest answer to that is obviously yes. The question you actually need answered is what they will still be doing in month nine (after the novelty burns off). Those are different questions with different answers, and only one of them shows up in a survey grid.
Below is the contrast the way I see it play out. The left column is the confident survey response. The right is what fieldwork and, eventually, behaviour tend to reveal instead.
| What a survey would ask | The confident answer it gets | What the border is likely to show |
|---|---|---|
| Will you shop in Johor Bahru more often once the train opens? | Yes, probably weekly. | A burst of novelty trips, then a settle back toward the old rhythm plus a handful of extra runs. Frequency claims run hot. |
| Would you move your weekly grocery run across the border? | For these prices, yes. | The big monthly stock-up migrates. The midweek top-up stays local. The basket splits, it does not move whole. |
| Does the exchange rate change where you spend? | A stronger ringgit makes Johor Bahru less worth it. | Crossings kept climbing as the ringgit strengthened. Convenience sets the trip, not the rate. |
| Would you cross for dental work or a haircut? | Only for the big treatments. | Routine cleanings and cuts start crossing once the queue is gone. The real calculus is time, not only money. |
That third row is the one I would frame on a wall. A stated preference about the exchange rate, held with total confidence, that the behavioural record already contradicts. If you build a pricing or location decision on the survey answer, you are planning for a shopper who does not exist. This is the whole reason we lean on observation, diaries, and in-context work rather than declared intent, and it is worth reading alongside how we approach the gap between what Singaporeans say and do before trusting any single data source on a question this expensive.
The Pre-Opening Research Map
To make this usable while there is still time to act, I have been sorting categories along two axes. One, how much does a five-minute crossing actually change the trip for that category. Two, what does it cost you to get the call wrong. Plot those and you get four boxes. The names are provisional, the logic less so.
The Pre-Opening Research Map
Most of the expensive mistakes I can foresee are Move First categories treated as Leave It. A grocery chain that assumes its weekly shopper is loyal because she always has been, a dental group that never imagined a routine cleaning was cross-border-contestable, a suburban mall that reads its Saturday footfall as secure (footfall that arrived by car, remember). The point of the map is not to predict the answer. It is to tell you which questions are worth paying to answer before opening day, and which can wait. If your category sits in the top-right box, the research clock started when the viaduct topped out.
The questions to answer before the train runs
Different players face different versions of the same shock, so the research briefs diverge. Here is how I would scope it by who you are. Note that almost every row needs a pre-opening baseline, because the entire value of this work is being able to measure the shift against something. Measure after the train opens and you have no counterfactual, just a number with nothing to compare it to.
| Who you are | The question the train forces | How to research it before opening |
|---|---|---|
| Singapore retailers and grocers | Which baskets leak north, and which stay put? | Diary studies plus in-store intercepts to baseline current cross-border share by category, before the flow moves. |
| Mall operators, both sides | Which trips are we winning, on which days and occasions? | Catchment and occasion mapping, with focus groups on the weekday-versus-weekend decision logic. |
| F&B brands | Is a Johor Bahru outlet a new market or a cannibal of the Singapore one? | Concept and location testing before signing a lease, paired with occasion segmentation. |
| Services: dental, gym, salon, optical | Will routine visits cross once the queue disappears? | In-depth interviews on the time-versus-money trade and willingness to cross by treatment type. |
You can see the methods repeating, and that is deliberate. Baselines want focus groups that surface the decision logic behind a crossing, not just a satisfaction score, and location bets want the kind of pre-launch scoping we describe in the first ninety days of a Singapore market entry. For any brand weighing a Johor Bahru footprint, this is a market entry decision in everything but name, with the same risk that catches international brands who assume a familiar market behaves the way home did. The border makes the two markets feel adjacent. They are not the same market, and a five-minute train does not make them one.
Probe worth running now: "Walk me through your last Johor Bahru trip. What did you buy, what did you skip, and what finally made you decide it was worth the queue?" The answer to that last clause is the thing the RTS Link is about to remove. Everything it was gatekeeping is now in play.
Why the window is now, not opening day
If I had to compress this into one piece of advice, it would be about timing, not method. The useful measurement happens before the train runs, because you can only quantify a shift if you know where things stood before it. A retailer who baselines cross-border grocery share this year can tell, by mid-2027, exactly how much moved and which segments moved it. A retailer who starts measuring after opening will see a changed number and be unable to say what changed it, the train, a promotion, the ringgit, or the weather. That is not analysis. That is a story told after the fact.
Let me be careful not to oversell the certainty here, because forecasting human behaviour around a piece of infrastructure that does not yet carry passengers is genuinely hard, and I would treat anyone claiming precise numbers with suspicion. What I am confident about is narrower. The friction that has shaped cross-border spending for decades is about to fall sharply for a large group of people (train users, not the whole population), the flow it was holding back is already strong, and the businesses that will adapt best are the ones asking the right questions in the eighteen-month window rather than the eighteen months after. The train is coming. The research advantage belongs to whoever moves while the flow still sits behind the jam.
What retailers and F&B brands ask about the RTS Link
When will the RTS Link open, and why research it now?
Which Singapore businesses are most exposed to cross-border spending shifts?
Does the stronger ringgit reduce the risk to Singapore retailers?
Why not just run a survey asking if people will shop in JB more?
Should a Singapore F&B brand open a Johor Bahru outlet before the RTS Link opens?
Baselining your cross-border exposure before the RTS Link reroutes it
Once the train runs, a changed sales number tells you nothing about what moved it. If your category sits in the north-facing path of the RTS Link, we design the pre-opening baseline, diaries, intercepts, and focus groups, that lets you measure the shift instead of guessing at it. Better to know your exposure now than to reconstruct it from a bad quarter.
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