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Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

bloomberg.com

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Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#51

Post by nunez »

sho wrote: post #5

I think that many asian cities have the right approach here. Treat cars as a luxury good in a space-challenged context and tax them heavily, while making sure to provide a world class public transport system so as to guarantee no-one actually needs a car. While it doesn't have a COE, tokyo does basically the same thing. You will have to pay $50k upfront for a 10-year car permit in singapore. In Tokyo there's no upfro…

The issue is that this only really works with small towns that are extremely densely populated. This falls short for much of the US whose towns are extremely spread out and sparsely populated.

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#52

Post by piva00 »

nunez wrote: post #51
sho wrote: post #5

I think that many asian cities have the right approach here. Treat cars as a luxury good in a space-challenged context and tax them heavily, while making sure to provide a world class public transport system so as to guarantee no-one actually needs a car. While it doesn't have a COE, tokyo does basically the same thing. You will have to pay $50k upfront for a 10-year car permit in singapore. In Tokyo there's no upfro…

The issue is that this only really works with small towns that are extremely densely populated. This falls short for much of the US whose towns are extremely spread out and sparsely populated.

How can you say that for a city like Tokyo?

Yes, the US has a problem with sprawling cities and suburbs, driving is part of the culture but it's a myth that it only works for small cities, one that I've seen repeated here and on reddit far too many times.

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#53

Post by bryanlarsen »

microcolonel wrote: post #10

I never really understood why governments insist on restricting vehicles and not access to roads. It seems like the scarce resource is efficient road access, not space for cars (even in sg, where there's not a whole lot of that either).

The costs of running a vehicle are mostly sunk costs. The capital, license & insurance costs of the car are higher than the marginal costs of gasoline & maintenance. This moves the decision point for vehicle usage to when you buy the car, so loading the costs there too may have some benefit.

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#54

Post by anpat »

piva00 wrote: post #52
nunez wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that this only really works with small towns that are extremely densely populated. This falls short for much of the US whose towns are extremely spread out and sparsely populated.

How can you say that for a city like Tokyo? Yes, the US has a problem with sprawling cities and suburbs, driving is part of the culture but it's a myth that it only works for small cities, one that I've seen repeated here and on reddit far too many times.

Not the OP but I guess his main argument was the part about densely populated vs sparsely populated towns/cities.

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#55

Post by whiskers08xmt »

orless wrote: post #41
whiskers08xmt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it necessary to have car if you have kids? It's quite possible to get around with kids, if the city is built for it.

Not every city is built for it. And not everybody lives in a city built for it. I live in a village 25km away from Frankfurt, there is no way you could get around here without a car.

Oh absolutely, I should have worded that more clearly. What I meant was, that metropolitan areas should aim to make it possible to get around with kids, instead of having to make tax exceptions for people with kids.

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#56

Post by intev »

dogruck wrote: post #42

This is a complicated topic. Here is one example line of thought: 1. Wow, all of these cars are annoying -- let's restrict them 2. But, rich people own these cars, and many of them drive into the city to spend money, which pays the workers 3. We all agree traffic is annoying, so those rich people sure must prefer to drive their cars 4. Hmmm, what will happen if we punish/tax/regulate their cars? Possible they'll stop…

I'm going to branch out from 3. here:

4) Why do they prefer driving these cars? Can we make public transport as good or even better than driving a car?

5) Let's put in place a plan to improve public infrastructure while restricting new cars on the road.

6) Once we satisfactorily accomplish 5, we can phase out cars.

My primary point being it's easy to create strawman lines of thought and have no meaningful conversation. ;)

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#57

Post by dogruck »

intev wrote: post #56
dogruck wrote: post #42

This is a complicated topic. Here is one example line of thought: 1. Wow, all of these cars are annoying -- let's restrict them 2. But, rich people own these cars, and many of them drive into the city to spend money, which pays the workers 3. We all agree traffic is annoying, so those rich people sure must prefer to drive their cars 4. Hmmm, what will happen if we punish/tax/regulate their cars? Possible they'll stop…

I'm going to branch out from 3. here: 4) Why do they prefer driving these cars? Can we make public transport as good or even better than driving a car? 5) Let's put in place a plan to improve public infrastructure while restricting new cars on the road. 6) Once we satisfactorily accomplish 5, we can phase out cars. My primary point being it's easy to create strawman lines of thought and have no meaningful conversatio…

I completely agree with you, and I think your branch is a good one. Also, personally, I look forward to the day when cities are essentially free of car traffic. I envision wide pedestrian boulevards.

Speaking by analogy, most of us rational thinkers accept that we cannot make conclusions such as "our government needs more money, therefore we must increase taxes." Maybe, but maybe not.

But I've noticed with cars (or, maybe insects) it seems to be easier to jump to "let's tax and regulate these bothersome machines away."

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#58

Post by sho »

crdb wrote: post #32
sho wrote: post #5

I think that many asian cities have the right approach here. Treat cars as a luxury good in a space-challenged context and tax them heavily, while making sure to provide a world class public transport system so as to guarantee no-one actually needs a car. While it doesn't have a COE, tokyo does basically the same thing. You will have to pay $50k upfront for a 10-year car permit in singapore. In Tokyo there's no upfro…

> Treat cars as a luxury good It's subtly different. The core idea is that car ownership has externalities and the implementation of solving these externalities is to limit absolute numbers and let the market decide what use to make of the quota. Luxury ownership is just one of many uses competing. Uber recently pushed prices up a bit [1] as it bought itself a rental fleet for its subsidiary Lion City Rentals; the RO…

> A COE-type scheme introduced in a city without high quality alternatives (such as Sydney or Los Angeles) would cause the immediate fall of the government

Well of course. It's a huge undertaking which would have to be executed over a generation, which probably requires a level of bipartisan political maturity and commitment that NSW can't muster (talking about Sydney). It could certainly be done though, maybe not with a COE system but by some other method of gradually pushing people out of their cars and into an expanding public transport network.

I guess describing everything they could do would take a book, but a good first step would be getting rid of the ridiculous helmet laws so at least people could ride to the station if they want to, and provide japanese-style mass bike parking there. Then just slowly start increasing the tax on cars, petrol, parking and tolls while absolutely pouring money into infrastructure (not roads), stopping any further urban sprawl, and systematically rezoning towards higher density and walkability. In 25 years you could achieve a lot.

I agree though, not going to happen anytime soon. Things will have to get worse before they can get better.

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#59

Post by tappaseater »

I spent a week in the South of France recently and the first Sunday morning I was sitting outside and this whisper of a train came by. No horns, whistles, smoke, noise. The service runs the coast every 30 mins. I thought about this joke service here in the Boston area and realized that we'll never have this in the USA; not this side of the Civil War 2 anyway.

Re: Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018

#60

Post by tixocloud »

mc32 wrote: post #3

I think it's overall a good move, given 12% of their land is used up by transport networks and it's a tiny island. That said, if space is a real constraint, I think they could make a deal with Malaysia, if they really needed to, but I think their independent streak is too strong to allow that thought --they once were part of it, pre-independence. On the other hand there are "autonomous" regions out there. The questio…

Singapore has a lot to gain from it's independence from Malaysia and the ideologies on how to govern a country differ greatly from the 2 ruling parties so little chance of joining together.

That said, Singapore has been friendly with neighbouring Johor for many years so a deal could be possible given the state's own ambitions.

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