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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
US urban planning was centered around cars basically since the 50s, not without the help of lobbying and the funding of certain urban planning studies. It’s part of the notion of the “neighborhood” which also arose via similar means, where the ideal of the Yeoman Farmer/middle class, that’s been a fixture since the country was founded, is now contained in the single family detached home. You may not live off the land anymore or have any material connection to that lifestyle, but you CAN own a commodified form of it shaped by your consumer preferences! It’s ironic how the individualism behind all this produces such conformity.
The full-cab pavement princess pickup trucks that line the suburban streets and mid-upper class neighborhoods symbolizes this so well. It’s like bitch, I got a big fuck’n truck here, you see that truck? That’s America.
I’m not disagreeing with you. But the only people that get the right to travel in a car are the rich. Rather than it be based on a needs-based system or lottery system. The rich get the right, but normal people don’t. That’s the point he’s trying to make.
I think it’s a clever way to get rich people to pay high taxes. Singapore is just not a place suited for private cars for the able bodied. The same policy in other countries wouldn’t be fair, but I could probably see it work in Manhattan or in the canal district in Old Amsterdam.
The catch is you don’t need a car in Singapore. It’s less than half the size of London with an incredible public transit system.
The need isn’t really there and the costs of maintaining one is very high. You aren’t going to have many if any poor people who could afford a car to begin with.
I’m hella anti car but I agree with you. Car ownership should not be gated behind a crazy one time fee preventing all but wealthy people from driving. Design your cities properly and make insurance expensive enough to cover the increased cost of infrastructure required to accommodate private vehicles. If someone wants to waste their money on a car when they can more easily take transit/active transportation then they should be able to.
I have no idea what you’re saying here … It’s fairer to jack up insurance to not be affordable, than to make the car unaffordable to begin with?
Design your cities properly
They’re talking Singapore. It’s an island city with excellent transit, plus quite walkable. This is the poster child for “designing your cities properly”
You can travel in a car, Uber, Grab and taxis allow you that convenience if you really need to go by car. It’s not about rich and poor. Having lived in SG and in HK, the public transport systems are really good, but I never felt the need for a car, indeed in HK the cost of parking alone is way higher than to use public transport. I have friends that live in the smaller villages that cannot survive without a car, but all they use it for is to drive to a convenient public transport hub.
I’m a petrol head, I love cars and now I’m living somewhere that has almost no public transport, so I now have a car again and I enjoy the freedom and fun that I love about car ownership. But it doesn’t change my opinion about using public transport where it is the better option.
Again, I’m not disagreeing with you about the good of public transit. I’m simply stating that car ownership is determined by how much money you have. The rich are allowed cars. You are not. That in and of itself is an unjust system regardless of how good or abysmal the public transit it. They are two totally different things.
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.
Still the same for me, and they've added some routes that improved the reach and accessibility. Trains are the same as always, and they're way better than they were in the 2000s.
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
Chicago Transit is awesome if you’re traveling toward/from downtown but god does it suck if you’re traveling across the north or west side. Chicago needs a east and south train from the metro station in Jefferson Park or something
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
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.
I did a quick Google 95% of households have a car in America. That’s “almost all” but a lot of those households presumably have one car but multiple drivers, the fractions is not easy to determine. So I can’t decide if your claim is true or not.
I agree with you that the person you were responding to is not at all in touch with reality though.
Worth also mentioning that car ownership is pretty much mandatory except in a few cities in the United States because of decades of car-centric infrastructure development and neglect of public transportation. Meanwhile, the average annual cost to own and operate a car in the US is around $10,728 in 2022, which is a heavy financial burden for many when the median household income is around $70,000.
Sounds like a lot of young men in Singapore (I kinda used to be like that, so I know that feeling). Once they travel a bit and learn more about the world I hope the entitlement will wear off somewhat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then you need to cancel the whole countryside… because there won’t be any « fantastic public transportation » outside of large cities… and living in the countryside doesn’t mean one is rich.
Yeah it seems so… and it’s not only the barren countryside that is set aside - anything smaller than metropolis or conurbations isn’t relevant to them.
2 buses a day and 1 train every hour - one direction at a time. You miss one due to whatever reason especially cancellation by an operator or delays and suddenly you lose 2 hours.
The other guy is wrong. For people living in the actual countryside, there's no reason to go after their cars. We don't need to provide top-notch public transportation networks to the tiny percent of people that live in the actual countryside. You scale what you offer to the population that exists. Some places are too remote to even get twice-a-day bus and that's fine: the kind of people that live in the actual countryside aren't simpletons and know what the bargain is. No one is charging them congestion taxes or coming for their cars.
But it's also irrelevant. These legitimately rural places... hardly anyone lives there. They're practically a rounding error. It doesn't really matter towards how the future needs to look if we want it to exist at all. Leave them alone. Country people aren't simpletons. They made their choices and understand the bargain. They know that they have to maintain their own roads, water systems, septic fields. Get satellite or cell internet. Generate most of their own power. They know they have to cook their own meals and that their options for shops are limited. They know that country life isn't supposed to be just the same as city life but with more space of your own.
This idea that some huge population of people living in the country is under threat -- or indeed even exists -- is just a bad faith invocation to reject actual sensible town planning policy. Because the reality is, nearly everyone lives in towns and the size and population where a town is "large" enough that it makes no financial sense to build for cars above all else is a lot smaller than you think. My experience is that nearly every American who claims to live in the country is simply mistaken. They actually live in the suburbs of a small town. A small town that is likely facing the barrel of a gun in the form of the financial sustainability of its current, car-first design patterns. A small town that is going to have to contend with either forcing suburban and "exurban" drivers to finally start paying their fair share to maintain roads, sewers, utilities, police, fire, and all these things or else accept that these services are going to increasingly fall apart and go away.
Always pleasant to be called a « rounding error »… Policies at country level generally applies to those living on the countryside same as urbanites save for some funky parking taxes that select cities elected to add on top of the global incentives to reduce the overall car park. This applies obviously to my local context in europe.
Man you seem to live in a paradise if those living in the countryside have to maintain their own roads or networks… here that’s all guaranteed to be at least minimally covered.
Make up your mind, guy. Which is it? Do we need to increase transportation spending for people in the countryside or not?
You can't have it both ways here. Either there are tons of people in the countryside meaning it makes perfect sense to fund transportation projects for them or there aren't and it doesn't. You can't have it both ways.
Policies at country level generally applies to those living on the countryside same as urbanites
Sure, in Singapore they do. Because Singapore is a city state on an island. Its countryside is a different fucking country.
But everywhere else in the world, that's total bullshit and you know it. Just utter tripe. You don't run the same policies and projects for the countryside as you do for the cities.
I'm tired of the wealth transfer from cities to the countryside. I'm tired of the tax dollars of the 85% of people that live in cities being used to build more roads and highways for the <15% of people that live in the fake "exurban" countryside and sprawling suburbs and lack the imagination to see that even there, the car doesn't need to be a religion.
Erh I don’t think you’re making sense… and generally your argumentation is a lot of rebuttals and no sources either.
So as an example let’s take the taxation in my home country - Belgium. We generally decided that cars are a source of pollution and that everyone should move away from the more polluting ones. To do that taxes were generally raised for cars not matching a given norm.
That you are rich or poor, from the north or south, countryside or city-side we have the exact same taxes.
If you’re poor and in the relative countryside you’re screwed ; public transport offer is getting shittier each years and soon older cars will be banned effectively or way too expensive to be affordable for the less fortunate / those that cannot already swap to compliant cars.
But I see that you’re an angry dude - you should redirect that energy into something more positive.
Are you against those taxes then, cause the premise sounds fair. Cars are dangerous and pollute a lot, whether they’re in the countryside or in the city.
They’re also expensive, especially older ones that you have to repair constantly. Seems you’ll do more good for the poor in the countryside making the public transit better than getting rid of the tax. You know, direct your energy into something positive like sustainable public transit, instead of a technology that’s slowly killing us.
It's almost a moot point in his case. The Belgian "countryside" is all towns and small cities. Every bit of it should be served by some kind of transit. It's only about 350km the long way across with a population of almost 12 million. There's hardly a hectare in it where you aren't a bike ride from a town center. Even in the dead center of Hodge Kempen you're still adjacent to small, fairly dense town.
He just falls for the typical false dichotomy that you're either in the "countyside" or you're in a major metropolis. When the reality is, most people live in small towns and small towns are still urban.
He replied to a guy talking about the states and applied just completely wrong standards of what both what good transit and the countryside are because his own experience doesn't map to what the other guy was talking about.
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.
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.
I mean on the other end of the spectrum, you NEED car because there’s no public transport. Just cross the island and you will see why that wish is quite a monkey’s paw.
There’s a cost to cars that most people don’t pay, in terms of their pollution and negative impact on the world. I wish others had to pay it as well, but it’s not bad to make the person who will pollute a bunch pay for that ahead of time
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.
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?
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.
Well here in my part of the USA, I can hop in my car and be at the front door of several restaurants or grocery stores within 5 minutes because I live in a nice area with low population density. Traffic jams almost never happen in my area. I have my own house and land where I can do anything I want. I work from home most of the time and don’t have to travel at all. On the days when I choose to work from the office, it’s an easy 20-minute drive from my home with zero traffic jams.
On top of all that, I can have any kind of alcohol I want and medical marijuana is legal. I can criticize my government leaders in public without fear of reprisal. I could be gay and have anal sex with men legally if I wanted to.
It’s sad that you can only reach places such as shops by driving.
Also you can’t even get an abortion, being trans is likely to get you genocides by a conservative, being black is likely to get you killed by a cop, you can’t see tits or swear but you can have blood and gore everywhere, your cops can no knock raid your house and drag you out to a detention centre and steal your children, you have little employee rights, and very few social protections, you’re banning books from libraries, stopping women getting healthcare, etc.
And on top of all that, you can’t even have any alcohol until you’re 21 and weed is still federally illegal and millions of innocent people are in gaol for decades because of it.
Honestly Americans are the least free of any developed nation and that’s only trending downwards for them.
I feel perfectly safe every day without guns, I choose to have them because it’s my right and a privilege that I celebrate. I don’t carry a gun to go out in public because I live in a nice safe area where violent crime is extremely rare.
It’s funny how all of you America haters constantly talk about how we “don’t have any freedom” but you can’t provide any example of anything that I don’t have the freedom to do. Please go ahead and educate me about what freedom you think I don’t have, because I do whatever the fuck I want pretty much all the time.
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.
I have total freedom of movement in the USA. I have a car and a motorcycle that are both paid in full, reliable, and efficient, and I live in a beautiful rural area where there is almost zero traffic congestion.
I can drive anywhere I want with total control over my own direction and destination. That is actual freedom.
If you actually live in a rural area, it shouldn't have "almost zero" traffic congestion. There should be actually none. I suspect you don't actually live in a rural area -- you probably live in a faux-rural suburb of an actual town that you need to regularly go to. And again, nearly everywhere else in the world someone living in such a place would have choices for how to do that. Take a bike ride, hop on a train, jump in your car, whatever you feel like that day.
If you actually live in the country, you're not actually getting in your car to make trips often at all because most of the time, you're staying on your property. You're self-supporting. If your lifestyle requires making long trips on the roads and highways every day, you're relying on massive government infrastructure spending to conduct your business. You have to either pay your fair share for that infrastructure -- which is WAY more than any current vehicle and fuel taxes could even get CLOSE to supporting -- or else you're going to have to accept that your lifestyle is only possible thanks to others subsidizing it.
Others who don't want the same things you want. Others whose idea of freedom is to be able to decide for themselves instead of having someone else pick for them.
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