Thursday, September 06, 2007

Encourage more people to use public transport

The roads in Singapore are getting congested. The Government plans to extend the Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) to more roads, extend the chargeable hours and increase the charges. These measures will reduce the congestion on the road.

The Minister for Transport said that building more roads does not help to solve the congestion problem. It encourages more people to use cars and will lead to more congestion at a later date.

I agree.

Read my views in this article which was published in Straits Times one week ago.
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2 comments:

hongjun said...

Building more roads and expressways is equivalent to installing more ERP gantries in my opinion. As far as I can see, increasing ERP charges and installing more gantries do not ease congestion problems.

The solution is to build better public transport systems whereby commuters can reach point to point faster. Not only frequency of buses and trains is to be increased, the quality of these services need to be improved.

When I say quality of buses, these include cleanliness, comfortable seats with slightly more room for stretching of legs, etc. I have noticed buses especially SMRT buses are often infested with cockroaches. The older SBS Transit single deck buses' seats are uncomfortable. Even I myself with a height of 1.68m find it rather uncomfortable having to sit in cramp seats. Where are the TV Mobiles?!?! New SBS Transit buses and all SMRT buses do not have them installed. I thought they cited installing TV Mobile as one of the improved service they are going to provide to justify a previous fee hike? Now they are taking them away but fees are still going up.

Regards
Loh Hon Chun

September 06, 2007 11:34 PM
Anonymous said...

In my opinion, I think the authorities have sorely missed out 1 group of vehicles which are contributing massively to congestion.

There is an ever increasing number of taxis being introduced onto the roads but we have seen the public writing into the forums commenting how difficult it is to find a taxi willing to pick them up.

On at least 5 occasions I have seen taxis lining up along the expressway leading up the Changi Airport. The queue starts from Terminal 2 snaking all the way the the stretch of highway along TPE when Runway 2 can be seen. In this queue, there should be close to at least 50-80 taxis and there does not seem to be such a high demand for taxis as the queue is static on all the occasions I encountered this phenomenon. The timing of this occurance is around 11.00-12.30am in the morning.

I think to improve the public transport network, the authorities should seriously review how the taxis can be deployed

September 07, 2007 8:44 PM

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