Ecotopia - a Cycling Singapore

Ecotopia: A Cycling Singapore

Lee Jun Bum (A0104150A) and Ong Siong Hwai (A0085839L)

AR2723 – Strategies for Sustainable Architecture | Tutorial 8

Preamble

In the infamous “fine” country Singapore, we need look no further than our transportation system to embark on moves towards an ecotopian Singapore. We have speeding fines, parking fines, eating and drinking fines, even fines for possession of durians in our public transport. There are also fines for riding your bicycle in some places. With so many “fines”, is our transportation system as “fine” as it should be then?

Our government frequently promotes Singapore as the vibrant hub of the east, boasting a world class transportation system, citing how one merely takes little more than ten minutes to get from anywhere to the city centre. This is evident in many promotion materials, like the Youth Olympic Games[1] (YOG) website and brochures and the Singapore Tourist Card[2]. In contrast, most locals are finding Singapore’s transportation not as fine as our government depicts it to be. On our public roads, congestion is one huge problem such that the authorities have to continually expand our roads and build more roads. Singapore Tourism Board (STB) touts our public trains to be the cleanest in the world[3] but does not provide statistics on how packed it is and the severity of its occasional breakdowns. Our public bus operators SBS Transit and SMRT have a near-monopoly on the bus market yet are not able to keep to the frequency of bus arrival rate they promised. As a result of this public dissatisfaction, we have seen our SMRT chief sacked, and even the transport minister replaced.

In view of the above issues, we propose a framework to implement cycling as a sustainable and widespread means of transportation as a strategy to an ecotopian Singapore. This would require governmental reform in creating a cycling infrastructure, with reference to the many successful examples from other cities, as well as...