good tbh, their metro kicks too much ass to have everyone driving around, their system has it’s problems but not driving isn’t one of them
what a lot of people can’t understand is that a car I’m singapore is a ball and chain. it’s not freedom by any stretch of the imagine there.
it’s a status symbol or a job requirement.
And why is this exactly?
Has it to do with the close to no parking spots in Singapore? Or something about fuel being expensive or something?
you can visit the entire country on the subway or a short grab ride.
owning registering, parking, repairing and fueling a car is a completely unnecessary living cost, not to mention much much more expensive than the US or Europe.
Well not exactly the entire country, pretty sure people who need to gedong would have a lot to say about that. But most places? Yea definitely. I do have friends who stay in Punggol that don’t enjoy squeezing in the trains to head to Buona for work though.
Oh yea, fuel is expensive. It’s like more than US$2 per litre now. If this online converter is right, that’s more than US$7.60 per gallon.
Honestly, as much as I wanted a car as a 20-something, I do think this is for the better. There needs to be some adjustments as a lot of the buyers are commercial entities trying to corner a somewhat unsustainable ridehailing market, but overall I’m happy with the tradeoff, especially with the improvement in public transport in recent years.
improvement in public transport in recent years
I’ve only visited once and that was several years ago, I’m surprised to hear the public transit has actually gotten better. I’m from Chicago, which is one of the few US cities with a functional metro, and it’s blown out of the water by the mrt just on comfort alone
There was a period in the 2000s when the metro was under maintained and profits were maximised (fuck you Saw Phiak Hwa), where there were times even at 10pm I couldn’t get on the train because they were so packed, thanks to horrible intervals between each train. Said undermaintence lead to some pretty bad breakdowns (for Singapore anyway) around the mid-2010s . Ever since then they’ve increased maintenence, decreased interval times during both peak and off-peak periods, and more lines were also added, though some of them were already being planned in mid-2000s.
The bus system has also improved when they moved to a hybrid model, where government tenders for operators to operate the bus routes, so there’s private and public aspects into it.
While not perfect, it’s definitely better than the mid-to-late 2000s, and I’m really grateful we have it.
Most of that is cultural. Americans are selfish pugs with no respect for community. Asians know how to behave responsibly and clean up after themselves
…which is why Japan needs to have female-only wagons. Generalizations like yours are utterly useless.
I owned my first car at 17 and oh… the hours I spent waxing it. Unwinding car culture in the US would take a long, long time.
Yea, it would, starting with alternate transport infrastructure, which is also not aided by city design. So yea, there is a ton of work.
Yea cars make so little sense there that I’m glad to see they treat it like first class on the airlines: it costs such an exorbitant amount that it’s basically just there to subsidize everyone else.
With a fully functional, affordable, universal public transport system, owning a car is a luxury, not a need.
It never was a need. This is a myth build by the car manufacturers. They lobbied for the car centered model with oil companies. This never was the model.
The same applies for suburbs full of houses.
I’m not going down that slope.
As someone who has lived in a large city, with a fully functional public transportation system, I was thankful for it, although it took me 2 extra hours of my life every day.
But living in a city, packed and stacked like merchandise in shelves is not a good way to live.
I got out the first opportunity I could take. Cost me family, friends and lower income but I don’t regret it.
Metropolises are not the way for civilization and CoViD was a cruel demononstration of how flawed the concept is.
That is all I have to say.
Yeah, Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Venice. All terrible places for a person to live… Nothing good ever happened in this cities…
You’ve literally just listed a bunch of places that sound like absolute hell.
the chosen one
Nah. Just someone who had enough of feeling miserable out of others decisions.
I feel you. If I walk an hour from my house I want to be in the wilderness with moose and bears and shite, not still in the city.
Are you in Alaska or somewhere near?
Northern Scandinavia.
Cost me family, friends and lower income but I don’t regret it
ouch
I wasn’t happy, I did my part to solve my problem.
A city shouldn’t be larger than 100 k imo.
Smaller cities, in the 10-15k range, have an added benefit: large enough to have large scale industry, small enough for people to know each other. Creates more security, as you tend to know if one face or another is new.
Well SK is also a pretty centralized country. Most people live in or right around Seoul.
Not much point in owning a car in such a case.
This is about Singapore though?
They got their Asians all mixed up
With a fully functional, affordable, universal public transport system
Y’all got any of them magic carpets? They’re just as real as this mythical perfect public transport system. And cars will always be more convenient. Convenience wins every time.
Eat it.
I lived in a city, with a public transport system, and it worked. Nobody is speaking of perfection here.
I live in a city, with a public transport system, and it’s terrible. Nobody but the poors bother with it as it takes HOURS longer than simply driving. This isn’t hyperbole, it’s actual trip times from actual trips taken.
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Your public transit system and town planning suck. An easy litmus test: do your buses and trans have dedicated lanes and priority at intersections? If the answer is no, your public transit system isn’t good enough and im something else is being given priority.
Try visiting The Netherlands. Bikes, specifically E-bikes win for convenience.
The Netherlands are smaller and more densely populated than most US states, let alone the entire continental US. - https://imgur.com/XcYgDtt
What works for them isn’t going to work elsewhere.
It doesn’t have to work everywhere to be implemented in some places. Bikes and e bikes in particular benefits everyone. Those that ride them in the inner ring and those that have to drive who encounter less congestion because the people who now ride bikes are not in cars or taking up a bus seat.
If you look at city density the twin cities in Minnesota actually could have and utilize infrastructure like the Netherlands but policy stops us
It takes 14 hours to walk across the whole country at its widest point.
City
My point is it’s unnecessary to own a car in a place that is so small. I’d have to hike for several days across windswept mountains in subzero temperatures to get to the next large(ish) town.
I 100% agree with you. I live in a City smaller than singapur and the amount of cars that clog the public transportation is infuriating. And everyone has an SUV. If everyone would even just drive a smaller car, we would have 1/3rd more space everywhere
Of course it’s based on money and not need based or a lottery system or anything like that because fuck the non-rich, amirite? I mean, if you don’t have a net worth in the seven figures are you even a person?
You don’t need a car in Singapore. Public transit is quite good and it isn’t that big of a city
It’s going down. It was $106,000 yesterday https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/04/singapore-cost-car-certificate
If you read the article, it says that price is for any car over 1.6 litre
To add to the other comment, COE has multiple categories, 106k is for cars with 1.6L engine displacement (or a certain amount of power for EVs) and above.
MFW a honda fit cost as much as a tesla
I think the car itself is on top of this, but even the car is more expensive because they’re harder to get
Is there sufficient public transportation options there? Is the cost the same for rural as for urban populations?
If you read the article, it says twice that the public transport is fantastic
We need that in the states. Fantastic public transportation and the ability to own a car should be expensive and hard to obtain even for the rich.
The amount of horrible drivers on the road in the states is crazy and way to easy to get a car and a DL.
My GF is just getting her license as an adult and the number of times she’s been asked “So have you been driving without a license for a while?” is incredibly troubling.
Singapore is an island city-state. The rural part of Singapore is Malaysia, a different country – and one that is also famously pretty damn dense where the people live.
It’s Singapore man, we don’t have a real rural population any more.
The entire country is about the size of New York City.
Singapore’s public transport system is fantastic. I lived there for 2 years and never felt like I needed a car. You only get one as a status symbol.
Their metro rules, smoothest ride I’ve ever felt on a train, including airport people movers
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Lol I’m guessing you’ve never taken bart or the mta. Singapore’s mrt is leagues better.
On the other hand, can you even comprehend what traffic and parking would be like if Singapore had US car laws? You should come to the states and try commuting daily into downtown SF or NY and see what that’s like.
public transport journeys get less comfy as demand increases, but car journeys just take longer
like a 30 minute journey taking 2-3 hours kind of longer
idk about you, but I’d rather endure some discomfort than spunk hours of my day down the drain
Fuck me, what MRT ride takes more than 1.5 hours? I’ve done Tampines to Admiralty before and it was less than that.
You need to travel more, perhaps you’ll appreciate our public transport some more. There’s a reason why you’re not getting support here. You’re just sounding like an entitlted person who wants a luxury mode of transport in a small city state that’s already pretty crowded with cars despite the stupid prices on them.
Where are you on a train in Singapore for that long?
Not OP but it’s possible if you stay in the north like CCK or Sembawang and need to travel to Changi Business Park for work.
Well fuck Singapore, you can’t even do drugs there. What’s the point of living in a freedomless police state that costs a fortune? Masochism?
Cars are a significant source of pollution, and Singapore has space issues. Honestly, this is probably a good thing. The cultural thing we have going on with burning oil in the form of gasoline is going to kill everybody in the next few decades if we don’t work to stop climate change.
I’m not one to defend Singapore much, but owning a car there is a very unnecessary luxury, so this is a pretty unfair reason to dislike Singapore (I can give you some better ones if you’d like).
Honestly in other big cities (NYC, London) most people would benefit from a COE scheme keeping car traffic under control.
but owning a car there is a very unnecessary luxury
I live in a huge urban city (about 10M ppl) with one of the best public transportation system in the world. Only real reason I NEED a car is a) when I go out of the city or b) move a lot of things.
Even in the case of b), I use rental car something like this:
It’s a compact car that can move some serious shit(image is the van version. you’ll normally have all the passenger seats like a normal car). Perfect car in the urban area imo. Bigger than that is honestly almost unjustifiable.
I mean, fuck cars but people are not going to be ditching cars any time soon because it’s just darn nice to have, even when there’s public transportation readily available in basically anywhere in the city. Transitioning to reasonable cars like this might be something we can work on for the short term?
I mean, as far as movement is concerned there’s a lot more freedom than in most of the US.
Singapore, you can pretty much get around anywhere you want quickly, safely, and cheaply using any of a variety of transportation modes.
US you’re forced to use a car and if you can’t afford one you can use someone else’s (taxi or rideshare) at a markup. Most people live in places that have no other viable modes, even though 80+% of people live in towns and cities that would have tons of alternatives pretty much anywhere else in the world (and would save money on their municipal budgets in so doing).
Charging people for the social cost of their personal luxuries, especially luxuries that have immense social cost like cars, in order to fund social goods is not something so ridiculously unreasonable. You should probably pick something actually bad if you want to criticize Singapore.
Lol, an American thinking they know best again.
Meanwhile I took a rideshare from a site visit at 5:30pm and there was already some congestion on the expressway. I cannot imagine what it’d be like if it was a free-for-all for cars.
Gun control?
It’s one of the safest places on earth?
