Firm steps to ensure a quality living environment
Straits Times 31 Jan 08;
In this third and final instalment of the land transport review, Transport Minister Raymond Lim explains how congestion will be tackled
How bad is it?
The insatiable appetite for more cars has led to an uphill battle against gridlock in many cities. In fast-growing economies like China, the car population grows at more than 20 per cent a year and peak-hour traffic in mega-cities like Beijing and Shanghai crawls at 5km an hour.
In the United States, motorists spent more than 4.2 billion hours stuck in jams, enough time to fill 65 million iPod Nanos with music, and used up enough extra fuel to fill 58 supertankers. The 'congestion invoice' in the US stands at some US$78 billion (S$111 billion) each year while congestion costs are estimated to be about 1 per cent of GDP in European countries such as Britain and France.
Singaporeans likewise desire to own cars and our policies, in particular, the use of Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) to manage traffic, have made it possible for many Singaporeans to do so. And so the vehicle population has grown steadily to the 850,000 vehicles today. With rising affluence, not only are more Singaporeans owning cars, but they are also using them more intensively. While the number of cars increased by 10 per cent between 1997 and 2004, the number of car trips increased by 23 per cent, more than double.
The effects are telling.
Congestion levels have increased by about 25 per cent since 1999, with more roads congested during the peak hours.
# Why not just build more roads?
Increasing road capacity and deploying traffic engineering measures will not in themselves guarantee smooth-flowing roads. Additional lanes and new roads attract more traffic and congestion soon returns. As a Time magazine writer put it, 'traffic is like water; it oozes across all available surface'.
Against our ever-growing appetite for car use, we are faced with the immutable realities of Singapore's situation: a compact city state with 12 per cent of its land already used up for roads. While we will continue to build roads like the North-South Expressway (NSE), going ahead, the pace of road expansion will have to slow down, from 1 per cent a year over the last 15 years, to 0.5 per cent a year over the next 15 years.
There are three inescapable conclusions from these observations.
First, as more and more Singaporeans own cars, it is clearly not possible for all of them to drive their cars to and from work every day. The only way to move large numbers of people efficiently in our densely populated city is by public transport. It is therefore critical that we make public transport much more attractive to the vast majority of Singaporeans, including those who have access to cars.
Second, the trade-offs that we are faced with have become much sharper. The more cars Singaporeans own, the more extensive ERP coverage and the higher the charges would have to be. This is the key trade-off we have to make, to maintain smooth-flowing roads.
Third, even with more extensive ERP, the current vehicle growth rate of 3 per cent is not sustainable, given the already large vehicle population and the slowdown in road growth. We have to lower vehicle growth.
These are not easy issues but we have to make these difficult decisions and act decisively to manage car growth and usage to ensure that Singaporeans will continue to enjoy a quality living environment.
# Will more ERP gantries and higher rates solve congestion?
Of all the different measures to deal with congestion, ERP is the only one that addresses the problem directly by requiring individuals to take into account the costs of congestion caused by their driving to others. Many other cities are coming to the same conclusion that there is no choice but to introduce congestion charging on heavily used roads. London, Stockholm and Milan have done so and New York and Amsterdam are considering it.
Without ERP, Singaporeans would be spending many hours in traffic snarls, just like people in Tokyo, Los Angeles and many other US cities, who pay for congestion, not with their wallets, but with the time that they have lost, stuck in traffic gridlock.
However, it is a growing challenge to keep our roads smooth-flowing. On the one hand, road growth is slowing; on the other hand, we are packing more and more cars onto our roads. In the last 10 years, the car population grew by almost 40 per cent, from 370,000 in 1997 to 515,000 today.
Coupled with this is the fact that our cars are among the most intensively used in the world, averaging 21,000km a year, compared to 9,100km in London, 13,900km in Melbourne, and 19,800km in Chicago. Not surprisingly, all these have resulted in the crowded roads and frequent peak-hour congestion that we see today.
Our ERP system has served us well, but it is coming under strain. We often hear feedback that ERP has not helped to ease congestion on the highest-demand roads like the Central Expressway (CTE) beyond a temporary respite; that ERP rate increases have little impact on travel behaviour; and that even though people pay ERP, they still face congestion on priced roads.
There is some truth in this. The reason is that rising affluence has led to a greater propensity to drive which in turn has caused a dramatic rise in traffic volumes; so much so that the scale and intensity of traffic congestion today is far different from what it was a decade ago.
Increasingly, given the more pervasive congestion today, the emphasis must be on encouraging motorists to shift to public transport, rather than drive on alternative roads to their destination. This is why the Government is spending billions of dollars to improve our public transport system to make it a viable alternative to the car.
# Why not just improve public transport and leave ERP alone?
Quite a number of people argue that since we are making such significant improvements to our public transport system, this should be sufficient to deal with our congestion problems. I wish it were so. But unfortunately, I know that it is not the case. The reason is that even if we free up some roads because some motorists decide to switch to public transport, other motorists will soon take their place, attracted by the smooth-flowing traffic, and very soon, these roads will again be congested.
So improving public transport is necessary but not sufficient in itself to deal with congestion. We need both - public transport improvements and congestion measures.
There is always a tension between the individual's personal interest in wanting unrestrained driving and the social goal of a liveable city. We have to decide whether as a people, we are willing to take hard decisions that will benefit our country; or whether, we will, like many other cities, postpone the necessary, store up the trouble and suffer future gridlock, with the attendant costs to the economy and living environment.
So we must move - building up our public transport so that people will have a viable alternative to the car and taking firm steps to curb excessive car travel demand, so that all of us will enjoy a quality urban environment now and into the future.
