Sustainable land transport in Singapore

Ooi Giok Ling. Today Online 29 Nov 07;

But are commuters making transport choices because of costs or because of the consciousness that public transport is a more sustainable option?

A "polluter pays principle" may have prevailed in the environmental management agenda in Singapore, but it does not appear to have been a major influence in choices made by commuters.


SUDDENLY, world leaders and regional associations from the European Union to Apec and Asean are sitting up and taking seriously the issues of global warming and climate change.

It may have been the impact of Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, or the Nobel Prize he won jointly with the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Or, it may have been the spate of natural disasters around the globe — drought in Australia, floods in China and Latin America, earthquakes in Indonesia, typhoons in South-east Asia and bushfires in California.

Yet, political leaders have said that it is difficult to translate the impact of global warming into localised, individualised terms. This poses a real challenge to placing sustainability on policy agendas.

For land transport, the challenge in cities like Singapore is to develop the consciousness among urban commuters that consumption choice, such as the use of public transport, is the sustainable way forward.

But are even savvy consumers aware of their impact on carbon emissions and global warming, when they choose private transport over public?

For the most part, public commuters are conscious that our land transport policies have kept our roads congestion-free and our businesses competitive, since there have been scary statistics about the cost of traffic jams in most of the region's large cities.

Air pollution, however, peaked in Singapore when traffic volumes increased during the 1970s because of industrialisation and urbanisation. At the time, addressing air pollution was a task for the Anti-pollution Unit set up in the Prime Minister's Office.

But, while environmental concerns have thus been very much a part of policymaking, there has been some ambivalence about the policy principles underlying the provision of public transport.

Due to policies introduced to "tame" the car — making the costs of car ownership and usage so expensive — public transport fortuitously became the main mode of transport in Singapore, once commuters decided they were unwilling or unable to pay the price for a car.

Here, Singapore has done wonderfully to ensure that the public transport option would be a viable and convenient one. Now, the challenge has shifted somewhat towards making commuters regard public transport as the preferred mode of transport.

But are commuters making transport choices because of costs or because of the consciousness that public transport is a more sustainable option?

A "polluter pays principle" may have prevailed in the environmental management agenda in Singapore, but it does not appear to have been a major influence in choices made by commuters.

It is therefore worrying that bus, train and taxi fares are inching up. This is tantamount to penalising commuters who pollute less than car owners.

Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) costs are supposed to help discourage car usage. But instead of conceding that — as major polluters and contributors to global warming — they have to pay their dues, car owners complain that the ERP hikes are not solving the traffic congestion problem.

Singapore needs commuters to commit to what will prove to be a more sustainable form of urban transport in the long term.

Here, the authorities may want to weigh in on the side of commuters choosing to take public transport even when they can afford to buy a car.

Instead, the many advertisements for the completion of the Kallang-Paya Lebar Expressway tunnel in the local newspapers seem to presage things to come in land transport: The new expressways are meant to save car owners and users commuting time; to allow them to speed and travel more smoothly as they opt for a private and less sustainable mode of moving about the city. This is not exactly reassuring.

For many cities in the region struggling with their traffic and air pollution woes, Singapore's urban land transport network is a dream that is proving elusive at best.

Adding sustainability to Singapore's land transport mission would keep the city ahead of the pack, as energy prices skyrocket and mobility costs and convenience pose possible future challenges.

This means commuters, the Land Transport Authority and public transport agencies all have to shift towards an understanding that will ensure competitive public transport fares, support for public transport operators to provide 24-hour services as well as services to less-frequented routes, more frequent and regular trips and denser coverage of the city by bus and train.

There is great scope for the "greening" of public transport that will mean lower carbon emissions and reduction of noise pollution.

Sustainability needs to be placed more firmly on the land transport agenda, and commuters need to develop a greater consciousness of their decisions when they move around the city, in terms of the consequences for long-term global environmental interests.

Ooi Giok Ling is a professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. The views expressed are her own.