Because government says no
Our thinking about transport is shaped by one simple thing, methinks.
In Singapore, the discussion about public transport is that it’s something we have to use, not something we choose to use. This shapes the discourse around improving public transport, for better or for worse.
The big hand of government policy is also a driver for this. And this means, that if we want to have more sustainable decisions regarding transportation, the government must liberalize certain matters.
Fundamentally deficient
Remember, public transport is something we have to use. We don’t have a choice. The government keeps car ownership deliberately out of reach of a majority of the population through the COE system, requiring aspiring drivers to fork out eye-watering sums of cash just for the right to own a car. And the price of that is going up.
This of course means that large parts of the middle class are locked out of the dream of car ownership. Angsty middle class point to the rise of private-hire vehicles and how they eat up the COE quota. There’s always something to blame for them not getting what they want. Of course, this is also incongruent with building so much more roads, especially with the NSE, Tengah, and other new towns. Despite all these development, the car population has only marginally increased since 2012.
So, to these people, the government better give them the next best thing — public transport that is convenient for them. After all, Singapore is supposedly dense enough. And this results in the car replacement bus mindset, where the thinking goes that “if the government disallows me from owning a car, the government better give me the same living outcomes that I would have, had I owned a car”.
Which generally works out to door to door public transport. Car replacement buses are generally bad for transit, but in order to meet these aspirations, many of them have been implemented in Singapore, since the MRT system in the 1990s didn’t go everywhere. Not only were expressway buses implemented, old trunk routes have also been kept around.
As we see in suburbia all over the West, be it the Bay Area, or Brisbane, or Montreal, or Ottawa, car replacement buses result in less frequent, less used public transport in the suburbs, and significant congestion in the CBD where everyone wants to go to.
And with Friendly Streets and other pedestrianization activities, bus speeds will slow down. The door to door car replacement bus may no longer be viable in terms of travel times, with strict speed limits implemented for all vehicles under such programs. Lane diets and traffic calming will also mean more vehicles are pushed into shrinking numbers of lanes, potentially making traffic worse in the new towns. But that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
If the government truly wants to encourage active mobility, then it has to be a good alternative to being dependent on buses stuck in traffic jams. As we see in London
Change is constant
However, the growth of the post-2009 medium-capacity rail network to serve many of these affluent areas, previously reliant on car replacement buses, means that questions are now being asked about the continued relevance of these services.
The latest manifestation of this mindset has come about in the withdrawal of Service 167. As discussed previously, Service 167 has already seen significant cutbacks, especially in light of sharing large portions of route with Service 980. The only difference now is that 167 provides direct bus service to Orchard Road and the CBD, both highly congested bus corridors, both with a TEL alternative available, while 980 does not.
Of course, some of that could be pure ignorance of the TEL route, but that can be fixed with aggressive PR, such as putting flyers in every mailbox within 400m of a TEL4 station. And access penalties may well be similar between buses and the TEL, considering Orchard Road’s one way road system and the narrow underpasses that connect the various malls.
But if the prevailing idea is that “the government better give me the same living outcomes that I would have, had I owned a car”, things change. You hear rhetoric that some do like to engage in, such as “what if the MRT breaks down” and “public transport is a public service, it should not make a profit, keep these because they serve the people”.
I take a different view. I believe that essentially the public is being asked to subsidize a lifestyle, by keeping these bus routes running even after the MRT opening, a mindset that is fundamentally selfish. If demand remains, and the government chooses to abdicate this market, let the private operators step in, just like the minibus market in Hong Kong. Hong Kong transit doesn’t mind making people interchange either, be it to or from the MTR, or just within bus networks.
If not, we’re also subsidizing property owners, who can see property prices increase by virtue of new MRT stations showing up in the neighbourhood, even if they don’t actually plan on using the MRT lines and stick to their traditional habits.
For what it’s worth, the government has demonstrated that it is not a fan of duplication. An example of this is the Deep Tunnel Sewerage System, now being constructed by the PUB. Phase 1 of the DTSS, relying on gravity sewers to transport waste water to be processed at Kranji and Changi water reclamation plants, has been completed, and Phase 2 is now ongoing, which will introduce the Tuas water reclamation plant.
The DTSS project promises to allow much of the land currently used by water infrastructure to be repurposed, and repurposed it has been. Kim Chuan, Bedok, and Seletar water reclamation plants were shut down and redeveloped into industrial areas with DTSS Phase 1, and DTSS Phase 2 will likewise see the closure of Ulu Pandan and Jurong water reclamation plants after its completion.
Of course, what if the DTSS fails somehow? That means sewage gets blocked, and the city smells, which looks bad, and could even be a public health risk. With the way we’re thinking about public transport, does that mean we should have kept the three water reclamation plants open? Should we maintain all that infrastructure supplying the water reclamation plants, in addition to the DTSS, just for that one day the DTSS might need to go down for maintenance?
I suspect if you brought up all those talking points to the PUB, the PUB might beg to differ. Apart from the opportunity cost of not freeing up the land, sewers also need to be maintained, especially with things like pump houses. But in land transport, since the government is denying the people a right, the people may think that government has to make up for it.
Can I be optimistic?
The real place where cars are the domain of the rich is Hong Kong, which has much less cars per capita than Singapore. It thus has much less traffic and an 80% transit modal share (edit: actually even better — 88% according to Deloitte!). In absolute numbers, that’s close to the whole of Singapore using public transit in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong rich keep their supercars in the garages of their Mid-Levels mansions and they don’t take them out to use — not often, at least. As such, the quintessential Hong Kong road jam picture more likely than not has a conga line of double decker buses, not cars.
Back in Singapore, recent news reports have also editorialized in mainstream media about the need to reform the COE system, especially with ERP 2.0. Distance-based charging, to pay for what you use, is naturally the desired outcome. But political inertia means that the government has to “study in detail” any proposals for distance based charging — in other words, it’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
What can happen, though, is semi-dynamic cordons, where implementing new ERP gantries becomes an overnight process with signs put up by the side of the road and configuration changes made in the system. The concept of operations of ERP is to keep traffic flow high, by managing speeds and raising fees just high enough to get some people to decide to take a different route. Placing ERP cordons can also happen in car-lite districts like Tengah, Bayshore and Jurong Lake District, where ERP and a lack of parking can manage car traffic along key routes like the AYE and discourage people from driving into car-lite districts.
But not outright ban them. You can still choose to drive, and the government should be liberalizing car ownership. But you could find yourself paying a lot of money to get stuck in jams and then of course you have to worry about parking and charging (for electric vehicles) and all. Which is the way it’s done everywhere else. In fact, a short term increase in car quota by lifting the zero growth policy may be permissible for 2024, and perhaps the 2032–33 trough after the NSE opens, to bring COE prices down and solve that political hot potato, while making use of the additional road capacity.
If the Transport Ministry wants to get for itself a more financially sustainable transport system that is able to keep its own lights on and provide good, well paying jobs to its workers, be it public transport or the private sector, it must start by confronting these deep seated cultural issues in Singapore. We may well be one of the best countries in the world for drivers, but not because we’ve built good urbanism that lets people take themselves off the roads.
Unlike, say, the Netherlands.
Car ownership, or the dream of, may well be the root of all evil. Aiming for a car-lite society does not only mean improving public transport and active mobility, it is to make it a mode of choice. While the nature of *public* transport means that it cannot serve everyone’s needs perfectly, it has to be weighed against the pros and cons of car ownership.
And as it stands, in Singapore the tradeoffs almost always weigh in favour of car ownership. Asking people to make sacrifices to use public transport will not work out if they aren’t already making enough sacrifices to use the car. Showing people just what it means to own a car in densely populated Singapore, can easily increase support for public transit if it can be proven to be the superior option, and not something you use because you have to.
Whether you want MRT lines, bus lanes, or bike lanes.
Like what you read? Join the Telegram Channel for updates!
