COE and ERP systems are not the only solutions that are available for the management of our limited road space, our vehicle population and the improvement of vehicle speed.
There must be other solutions to complement these two systems to make it more effective and less costly to car owners.
On 22 Nov, MOT Raymond Lim told Parliament that ERP charges have been raised recently as traffic speeds on the relevant roads had fallen below the optimal range following a regular review.
Also, COE prices have short to a record 10-year high.
What are the solutions that could be used to improve our road and vehicle management systems?
Does the MOT realize that road-side parking is affecting vehicle speeds on our roads? What should be done?
MOT should consider removing street-side parking to improve on vehicle flow. More car parks should be built progressively for off-street parking to replace road-side parking.
Singapore should remove all paid car parking lots alongside our streets if we wish to allow a bigger car ownership when our population reaches six million people.
More off-street car parking lots should be built underground, above ground, below viaducts or elevated train tracks, or above the roads and expressways. Many of the surface car parks should be put to better use in land-scarce Singapore.
No road-side parking is allowed in many major cities. For example, Japanese cities do not allow road-side parking, and Sydney does not have road-side parking in the inner-city areas. They know that road-side parking creates congestion and affects the flow of traffic.
In land-scarce Singapore, it does not make sense to have ERPs all over the place while on the other hand our streets have road-side parking.
I would like to suggest that LTA and the URA set a target to remove road-side parking in at least 50 percent of our streets within a radius of 12 km from City Hall as soon as possible.
Ultimately, Singapore should not have any road-side parking.
Also, we could remove many of the ugly white and yellow lines drawn on our roads when road-side parking is no longer allowed anywhere in Singapore.
This will mean saving lots of money when we have less lines to draw or to maintain on our streets.