Inadequate Public Transportion III ( Final)

This week has been a victory of sorts for every netizens who have been putting up articles on how key public services have been unable to keep pace with our rapid population growth. In a stunning flip flop, MM Lee made the following statement:

“We’ve grown in the last five years by just importing labour. Now, the people feel uncomfortable, there are too many foreigners. Trains are overcrowded with foreigners, buses too, property prices have gone up because foreigners with permanent residence are buying into the market. ” - MM Lee 28 Jan 2010 Straits Times

This is in complete contradiction to Minister Shanmugam who had made the following statement just a few days earlier:

"The first misconception is that somehow there are five million people and that's putting pressure on all of us. It doesn't.'Of the five million, 3.2 million are citizens and roughly 500,000 are permanent residents (PRs). The remaining 1.3 million are here on temporary work permits and they 'impose no burden' on the public housing system" - Minister Shanmugam.

While small, this victory shows what Singaporeans can achieve if we stand together and speak with one voice. It of course remains to be seen if MM Lee’s statements will translate to concrete policy changes or if this is just nice sounding pre-election rhetoric.

If you play Texas Hold’Em, you will recognise that MM Lee has done the equivalent of folding the PAP’s hands as it was increasingly obvious that they were “bluffing”. While they would now most certainly like to “move on”, let us continue to examine the impact of the FT policy on key public services and road conditions.

In this last article on transportation, let us examine the impact of immigration on car and taxi use.



From 2003 to 2008, the total population increased by 17.6%. The car population increased by an astounding 35.1% !!! The taxi population increased by 25.4% !!! The road network however increased by only 5.1%.

It seems that the only public transportation that has increased far beyond the population growth is the taxi population! This may be a good sign for taxi companies like NTUC Comfort but it may reflect something else on our economy itself. It means that there are more Singaporeans losing their professional jobs and they eventually switch to driving a taxi for their livelihood. This is validated by the various news report about how an A-Star researcher ended up driving a taxi. Many of these NEW taxi drivers are mostly middle age people who are highly educated and qualified in their previous jobs. There are mangers, engineers etc and yes, I have met some of them before.

This reflect a serious problem of another dimension of the influx of foreign workers. These Singaporeans who were forced to drive taxi when they are substituted and displaced by cheaper foreign workers are basically “underemployed”. It means that the resources that our nation has put in the development of these people are being wasted altogether!

On the other hand, this table helps explain why in spite increasing ERP charges, our roads are increasingly congested. Instead of increasing the car population at a sustainable rate, LTA appears to have adopted a revenue maximization model of issuing large numbers of COEs in excess of their road building program. The increased car population causes congestion. LTA then proceeds to increase ERP charges to “ease congestion”.

As noted by MM Lee, the primary reason for why trains and buses have become more crowded is because of population growth. Like Singaporeans, PRs and other middle income foreigners need to get to work too. The increase in the car and taxi population is however greatly in excess of the population growth rate of 17.6%. The likely reason for this is because of a “substitution effect”. This “substitution effect” was first proposed by a commentator in Lucky’s blog. This commentator had suggested that perhaps the MRT was getting more crowded because more people were switching to use the MRT.

The table above and the table on SBS bus ridership contradicts this hypothesis. Instead it would appear that because public transport in Singapore has become cramped and uncomfortable, people are switching to use cars and taxis. This applies to both Singaporeans and middle income foreigners. The magnitude of the switch in the face of repeated increases in COE, ERP and taxi fares is testament to just how badly the Singapore public transport system has been degraded. I was not the first to spot this trend. Lucky first wrote about it here.

The whole series of charts and analysis I have done so far contradicts the Ministry of Transport that they are aiming to increase public transport usage by converting those car owners to utilize public transport. The ministry has aimed to increase rail network and train services to achieve that. However, contrary to the ministry wishful thinking, it seems that the public transport system has reached an unbearable point that more and more people are switching to owning private cars.

The provision of comfortable, effective public transportation is a responsibility of all good governments. The central guiding principle should be serving the transport needs of the people first and profits second. Unfortunately the current Transport Transport Minister， M Raymond Lim, seems to be putting profits first and the transport needs of the people a very distant second.

Goh Meng Seng