In recent years, especially as the population of Singapore ballooned alongside the increasing awareness and wariness of air pollution and the associated health issues caused by combustion engines amplified by traffic in as dense a space as the island nation, their relationship with the four-wheeled motorised carriage has been fractious.
It has been no secret that the Southeast Asian country has been engaged in a battle to maximise space and preserve the integrity of its environment even as development continues to encroach upon any vestige of natural tropical greenery heretofore left largely undisturbed. Unsurprisingly, the car and car ownership have come squarely into the government’s crosshairs.
Starting from February 2018, Singapore will begin a campaign to drastically curb the rate at which new vehicles are added to its roads. So dramatic is this culling, in fact, that they plan to stop increasing the total number of cars on its roads starting from that point early next year.
The current annual growth rate for new cars and motorcycles have been deliberately hobbled by high taxes and costly permits called Certificates of Entitlement - basically, a high premium on even permission to own a car or motorcycle of any kind - that are distributed in limited supply to the highest bidder each month. Even then, owners are only allowed to hold on to these vehicles and their permits for a maximum of 10 years. From early next year onward, the number of new cars will be determined by the quantity of vacancies created by vehicle de-registrations.
Prior measures weren't enough, it seems, to sate the needs of the country’s Land Transport Authority (LTA), at least in comparison to the tradeoffs recognised as the Singapore's growth in population density is foreseen to grow. To not cause undue stress upon an even more efficient infrastructure network that would need further resources and space to accommodate this, car ownership has become unfortunate victim of progress.
According to a statement released by the Singapore LTA: “Today, 12% of Singapore’s total land area is taken up by roads. In view of land constraints and competing needs, there is limited scope for further expansion of the road network […] In view of Singapore’s land constraints and our commitment to continually improve our public transport system, we will lower the vehicle growth rate from the current 0.25% per annum to 0% with effect from February 2018.”
While private ownership of cars and motorcycles will be capped at the current number once the February 2018 deadline comes into effect, registrations of buses and goods vehicles (Category C) will remain at unchanged 0.25 percent until Q1 of 2021 in order to “provide businesses more time to improve the efficiency of their logistics operations and reduce the number of commercial vehicles that they require.”
