LAND TRANSPORT:  DIFFERENT INTERESTS, COMMON GOAL

Mr Patrick Daniel, President of the Press Club,
Ambassador Kesavapany, Director of ISEAS,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Introduction

Thank you for inviting me to speak here today.  It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to address all of you.

In January this year, we completed the review of the Land Transport Masterplan.  The 3 strategic thrusts in the Masterplan laid out the direction for our land transport system over the next 10 to 15 years.  We completed the review after an extensive, year-long process of top-down systems planning and bottom-up consultation with local communities.

With the review completed, LTA set about delivering improvements, working together with transport operators and community groups.  Regular commuters on public transport would already have felt a difference.  For example, we have now some 800 additional train trips a week, an expanded menu of Premium Bus Services and more frequent basic bus services.

These improvements represent only the immediate quick-wins of the past 8 months.  More will come.  Major policy initiatives, such as introducing distance-based through fares, further refining the ERP system and centralising bus network planning, will enhance our transport system, and benefit commuters as a whole.

Implementing change involves its own set of challenges.  Different groups of commuters have different travel habits, and will hence feel the impact in different ways.  Some groups of commuters would gain more, and support the change.  Others may not see the benefits immediately, or feel they would lose out.  They may ask, “Why am I being penalised?  Why me? Why now?”

So when we implement change, we face the challenge of balancing the interests of these different groups.  How do we do this – bring people with different interests together, make the necessary trade-offs, and move ahead towards a common goal?  This is the focus of my talk today.

Why now?

Let me first address the question, “Why now?”  One of the strongest voices to have emerged recently is the call to postpone tough measures.  Some people fear that changes to public transport may result in a large fare adjustment, or that the ERP changes will force them to pay more every day.  These are concerns I take seriously, all the more so at a time when costs are rising.

The decisions that can be postponed, the Government will postpone. But there are decisions where we have to take a hard look and ask, “Is it necessarily better for us to postpone it?”

Take ERP.  Our car population and travel demand has been growing faster than our roads.  Between 1997 and 2004 our car population grew by 10%, while car trips grew by 23%.  But our road capacity only grew by 5%.  As a result, congestion has built up.  In 1990, when the 3% vehicle growth cap was introduced, it amounted to 16,000 additional vehicles a year. Today 3% amounts to 26,500 additional vehicles every year. So while we will still allow the car population to grow, it has to grow at a slower pace.

A journalist from the UK Telegraph, writing in November last year, remarked that “peak-hour traffic jams have become the norm” in Singapore.  LTA’s data support his observation.  Before we implemented the ERP changes this year, average traffic speeds in the CBD had dropped by more than 20%.

If you switched hats from being a journalist to become the Transport Minister, what would you do?

One option is to do nothing.  It might make you popular, or minimise your unpopularity, and avoid making anyone too unhappy.  Some cities have taken this approach, deliberately or otherwise.  In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced a proposal for congestion pricing in Manhattan in April 2007, but he could not get it through the state assembly.  Residents from New York’s outer boroughs strongly objected to it, as they commuted daily into the city and felt the burden of the costs would fall on them.  New York did nothing, and the result is gridlock for New Yorkers in the outer as well as inner boroughs.

In Jakarta too, the daily gridlock compels office workers to spend 6 hours or more commuting every day.  This has forced Jakarta’s city administrators to now consider an ERP-type congestion pricing scheme.  In the meantime, even the Jakarta Traffic Police have found it impossible to move around in cars and motorcycles; they have started to deploy enforcement officers on rollerblades instead.

We cannot afford to let something similar happen in Singapore.  The stakes are nothing less than our continued economic competitiveness, and our quality of life.  That is why we must act now.

Let me draw an analogy.  Most of you know what body mass index, or BMI is.  The Health Promotion Board advises that if your BMI is 23.0 or higher, you face a moderate risk of heart disease and diabetes.  So you monitor your BMI closely, and it is creeping up over time.  22.8, 22.9, it reaches 23.0.  The doctor says, “ You’d better start doing something”, and you go on a diet.  Same too with our roads. LTA monitors the speeds on the road.  If speeds fall below 20 kph, they put the drivers on a diet.  $2 every time you cross a gantry, and soon the BMI falls back below 23.0.

But most people do not like diets.  After all, a diet is “die” with a “t” at the end.  So let’s say you put it off.  23.1, 23.2, you don’t feel any different.  In fact, the diet makes you feel weak and hungry, so why bother with it.  Your weight continues to grow, and sooner or later one day, you are in trouble.  By then, dieting is no longer enough.  More drastic measures are needed.

So putting off a diet when one is overweight, or postponing ERP when congestion builds up, is not a good idea.

But even as we adjust the ERP system, we must also provide a viable alternative to the car.  People still need to get from point A to point B.  We will do this in the form of better public transport.  We are putting in more frequent services, as I mentioned earlier.  But we will also make some fundamental changes, to make our public transport system more attractive.

One of these changes is centralised bus network planning.  Today, the operators plan bus routes, and these routes are subject to approval from the Public Transport Council (PTC).  Going forward, the PTC will retain its oversight role, but a single agency, LTA, will take over the planning of the bus network.  This will allow us to design bus routes together with the rail system in a more integrated way.  It will speed up journeys, for example, by routing circuitous feeders more directly to key transport nodes.

Another major change is distance-based through fares.  This will remove the current financial penalty for making transfers – an inequitable situation where transfer journeys cross-subsidise direct ones.  It also provides greater choice for all commuters, to freely choose transfers if it made sense for them, without having to pay a penalty.

Why these fundamental changes to public transport, at this time?  In recent months, high fuel prices have helped to persuade some motorists to try public transport.  This has driven bus and rail ridership to historic highs.  But this is only the ‘push’ factor.  We need to create ‘pull’ factors to improve the image and experience of travelling on our buses and trains.

I think Singaporeans have a better regard for our public transport than in other countries.  But we can do more.  If commuters’ experience on public transport improves, commuters who switch to use public transport now will choose to stick with it, even if fuel prices fall later.  In other words, we have a unique window of opportunity now, to sustain a decisive shift towards public transport.

A few weeks ago, I was glad to see an article by a Straits Times journalist, Miss Posh Nosh, who went budget by giving up her car and taking the bus for a week.  She wrote, “I was sweaty beyond belief at first, but became progressively less so as the week wore on.”  And by the end, she is almost a convert.  “I now have an ez-link card,” she says, “and I’m not afraid to use it.”

I hope that there are more like Miss Posh.

Why me?

That is why we must act now – go on a diet with ERP, and pull people towards public transport.  But there is a second challenge.  As we take action, our policies will inevitably affect different commuters to different degrees, depending on their individual travel patterns.  Some may gain more.  Others who do not gain as much may feel aggrieved.  This is the question, “Why me?”

To understand how different groups of commuters are affected by our policies, we must engage in local consultation.  We cannot act like a ‘bulldozer’.  And indeed, this has been an ongoing effort.  In the year-long policy review leading up to the Land Transport Masterplan, we held a series of focus group discussions, to take on board a wide range of views.  LTA has also formed a new Community Partnership Division, whose officers have the sole charge of engaging and working with the local communities.

Consultation is an integral part of policymaking, not an optional ‘extra’.  It has helped us make better policies.  For example, many people argued that our policy on PARF and COE rebates was inconsistent with our promotion of public transport. We agreed. The rebates can now be encashed. More recently, the Chinatown Business Association asked LTA to look at the impact of the new ERP changes on their business in the evenings.  So we went to listen.  In the case of the Singapore Riverline gantries, we decided to review the rates in October when traffic patterns have settled, one month earlier than scheduled.

Consultation means we listen willingly and take all views into consideration.  But it cannot mean trying to please everyone, or acting on every piece of public feedback.  If it did, we would end up pleasing no one.

Instead, we must remain focused on the greater good, the longer term, and the collective benefits to society as a whole.  Only then can we bring together different groups of commuters with disparate and sometimes competing interests, and move together towards a common goal.

Take distance-based through fares. As a first step in the transition, the PTC may decide to raise the transfer rebate this year.  If so, this may impact different commuters in different ways.  The majority of commuters who regularly make transfers will benefit directly.  They could see a small or even negative fare adjustment.  But commuters who today make mostly direct trips worry that they will see fewer benefits, and indeed may have to pay for some of the costs of the transfer rebate restructuring.  Some commentators called this trade-off between direct and transfer journeys, “robbing Peter to pay Paul”.

They ignore the fact that at present, it is Paul who is being unfairly asked to keep Peter’s direct fares lower than they should be.  Distance-based through fares will correct an existing imbalance, not bring about a new one.  As this example shows, commuters who choose transfers have to pay more, even though they travel a comparable distance from the same origin to the same destination.  They are effectively cross-subsidising the direct journeys.

What distance-based through fares will do, is to reduce and eventually eliminate this financial penalty, and correct the imbalance.  And it is not only commuters who already make transfers today who will benefit.  All commuters will stand to benefit.  Travel patterns change.  You may have a new workplace or new home that requires you to take a transfer trip.  Even if you don’t, you may still benefit, as you will have greater choice to choose a transfer journey rather than wait for a direct bus, reducing both waiting time and travelling time.

But we are not correcting this inequality for its own sake. Ultimately, transfers are an integral feature of our hub-and-spoke public transport network.  The transfer penalty distorts commuter behaviour, by discouraging people from making transfers when it is more efficient to do so, or if makes more sense. In the long term, we will never get the most efficient and optimal hub and spoke public transport network unless we get rid of the transfer penalty.

The same applies to centralised bus network planning.  Some commuters are excited about it.  They want faster and more direct bus services, ideally straight from their home to their workplace.  But I should add that even then, the request is sometimes “Please do not put the bus stop outside my house, please put it in front of my neighbour’s house”.  Other commuters have expressed concern, because the current services work well for them and they see no need for change.  This variety of reactions is only natural.

But it is simply not possible to accommodate every request.  Resources are limited and so we must find the best way to make use of it. I used this example of 20 origins and 20 destination points in my speech in January. To have direct services serving all of them, we will need 400 services, or more than the number of services SBST and SMRT have today. If we increase this to 60 origin points and 60 destinations, the number of direct services needed grows exponentially to 3,600, which is only slightly less than the combined bus fleet from SBST and SMRT.

If LTA tried to give everyone a direct route, these services would have to run very infrequently or clog up our roads and as not may people will use them, they would have to charge very expensive fares. Hence from a system viewpoint, a hub and spoke model is the correct model for a compact city state like Singapore. We can then have more frequent and faster services bringing commuters to a transport hub and then onwards to their destination. We can meet people’s needs with the same amount of resources.

Neither can LTA draw up bus routes without concern for commercial viability.  This does not mean that every route must make money, but the whole package of bus routes, when bundled together, must remain viable.  Otherwise, operators will start to cut corners, not maintain their buses, and services will degrade.  In the end, it will be commuters who suffer.

The ERP adjustments, also, would impact different groups of motorists in different ways.  You might have the impression that surely, ERP is one area without different interest groups.  Who could possibly love the gantries?

Just as no one wants to pay for road usage if they can help it, no one wants to be stuck in traffic jams either.  The reality is that different individuals have their own preferences, and these preferences may change from day to day.  A young man driving home in the evenings after work may not be rushed for time.  He may not want to pay even if he has to spend an additional 20 minutes on the road.  But come Friday night, he may be headed for a hot date.  If he is late, his date might be unimpressed, as if he had turned up in slippers.  So he may be glad to pay a few dollars to get there early.  And it is not only young men anxious to make a good impression on a hot date.  You can see the Straits Times street poll showing that a majority of respondents would rather pay for smoother traffic than put up with a traffic jam.  And a commuter, 58 years old, recently wrote in to Lianhe Wanbao to express support for ERP.  He said:  “If you pay, then there are no traffic jams.  If you don’t pay, then you get traffic jams.  Geylang has no ERP, and traffic is jammed every day!”  And then he went on to ask, “Why don’t we have ERP?”

This does not mean that we will rush to put up a gantry in Geylang.  As with any other road, we will continue to monitor traffic speeds, measure its body-mass index (BMI), and act accordingly.

The fact is that we put up ERP gantries only when we have absolutely no choice.  It is a last resort after we have exhausted all reasonable options.  Furthermore, we understand that system-wide ERP changes will impact significantly on people’s lives, so we have taken a phased approach when implementing them. By doing things gradually, we hope to end up having to do less.  This is, in fact, what happened.  Earlier in January this year, LTA announced that the ERP gantries at Toa Payoh Lorong 6, Kallang Bahru, Geylang Bahru, Upper Boon Keng Road and Bukit Timah Road would be switched on for 18 half-hour periods from Apr 2008.

However, when LTA measured the speeds again in March, there were improvements.  In the end, LTA only needed to impose ERP for 8 half-hour time periods.

Also, in January this year, LTA announced the intention to put up 6 gantries in November – at Commonwealth Avenue, Jalan Bukit Merah, Serangoon Road, Alexandra Road, AYE-westbound near Alexandra Road, and PIE-westbound near Eunos.  Since the July ERP changes in the CBD, we have observed an improvement in speeds on many of these roads.  If this is sustained, then LTA will be happy to review the plan.  It may then need to put up only a few gantries rather than all 6 gantries.

Conclusion: Towards a common goal

These examples show that commuters are a heterogenous group, with a wide variety of interests, many of which conflict with one another.  Any major policy initiative, may affect commuters to different degrees.  It may go against the grain but it would be helpful for those who gain to speak up.  If they choose to remain silent, while others actively play the role of a “vocal minority”, the public debate would become unrepresentative, and increasingly it will be difficult to address long-term challenges. Overall, it will then be lose-lose.

While it is impossible to design a common transport system that accommodates every individual’s preferences, we will provide one that gives everyone choices that they can make according to their individual circumstances.  In every major policy improvement, some will have to adjust more than others so that the common long term benefits for all can be realised.  We cannot let this disparity paralyse us, as the equal misery of status quo will leave no one better off.  Instead, we must be willing to make these difficult trade-offs, explain to the people why some painful adjustments are unavoidable and help those affected by the transition as much as possible.  Only then can we move together towards a better land transport system, and have a more liveable city in the future.

Thank you.