One Less Car

When we decide that we have to build a transport route right through some of our last remaining nature reserves (and thus at huge environmental and cultural cost), we choose to build an expressway instead of a rail link, although the latter would carry more commuters in total and help those commuters who at present have the relatively longer commutes (public transport commuters versus drivers).

Elitist transport policies, anyone?

Some highlights from a study done by a certain Ooi Giok Ling, as reported by the Business Times:

Singapore ranks poorly among global cities for the reach of its public transport system, according to a recent comparative study of 50 cities by Ooi Giok Ling from the National Institute of Education.

The Republic ranked 31st in terms of total length of public transportation lines per 1,000 people, Prof Ooi’s study shows.

[...]

Singapore has just 0.1 km of subway track per square kilometre, compared with 0.4 km for Hong Kong, 1 km for London, and 4 km for Paris, said Dr Kog.

‘We still have a very long way to go in terms of MRT transport. To reduce the car population, we need very good public transport,’ he said.

Out of the 50 cities, Singapore also ranked 37th in terms of total length of reserved public transportation routes per thousand people.

Singapore ranked 20th in terms of total number of public transport vehicles per million people.

[...]

It also ranked 44th in terms of daily trips made by foot per person, and 8th in terms of daily trips made on public transport per person.

The study covered major cities in Europe, the US, Australia, Japan, China, India, South-east Asia and the Middle East. The European cities did especially well, said Dr Kog.

So Singaporeans walk a lot less than people in the other cities surveyed. Since we have a high ranking for public transport usage, they probably didn’t count walks made to/from public transport stops as trips made on foot. I find the sedentary habits of people here quite shocking —- many would consider even a 200m walk ‘far’. And I think these habits are at least partly a result of urban planning that does not, for example, encourage you to walk to the grocery store instead of driving, even if it’s only 1/2 km away. For example, many of my walks would be a lot more pleasant if they didn’t involve crossing large busy smelly arterial roads where I either have to wait for ages for the green pedestrian lights or detour (both horizontally and vertically) to an underpass/overpass. Small roads are far more friendly to pedestrians.

He also said Singapore’s garden city concept does little for nature and biodiversity - a view echoed by many environmentalists here, including the Nature Society and its president Geh Min.

Instead, planners ought to think about urban biodiversity. Part of this, ironically, is to consider packing more people into a smaller area.

Yes. Singapore’s urban planning seems to be modelled after American urban sprawl. The only difference being we have somewhat better public transport linking ’suburbs’ to ‘hubs’. But we have the strip malls, the centralization of services within each ’suburb’, the car-centric design of each ’suburb’, the channeling of all traffic through a few often-congested arterial roads, the expressways linking suburbs to other suburbs with few other transport options available, etc.

Dr Kog, who is president of East West Engineering Consultants, also said many buildings in Singapore are built in ways that force occupants to rely on air-conditioning, due to lack of ventilation.

The country cannot mandate against use of air-conditioning, but could legislate for building conditions that are less dependent on air-conditioning, he said.

This is another of my bugbears. Many buildings in Singapore have completely air-conditioned interiors. This seems to be quite unnecessary. Supposing that it is necessary for office productivity to have air-conditioned workspaces, we could still design buildings to have outward-facing, well-ventilated corridors (a la HDB flats) or common non-work areas like pantries and lobbies. Like it or not, the whole world, and that includes us, has a responsibility to the environment. Sadly the economy does not provide its own carbon tax, so inefficient, inconsiderate building designs aren’t penalised. And one doubts the government would want to penalise the construction industry thus (besides, non-air-conditioned corridors are so third-world).

When I read somewhere that the Transport Minister had indeed mentioned some pro-cycling measures, I’d actually dared to hope that it’d be something like being able to bring bikes on trains during off-peak hours, or bike racks on public buses, or even bike lanes on the roads. No such luck, of course.

From his speech:

Facilitating Cyclists

44 Cyclists are another group that we will facilitate. There is a growing interest in cycling, with more people cycling for recreation, or to get around the neighbourhood.

45 We invited some of them to our land transport review focus group discussions to see how we could better cater to their needs. Some cyclists asked for more bicycle stands around our bus and MRT stations. Others made the point that some foldable bicycles were not much bigger than prams, so why not allow them onboard our trains and buses?

46 Responding to this, LTA together with the public transport operators will launch a six-month trial from March 2008 to allow cyclists to carry their foldable bicycles on board trains and buses. LTA will also work with NParks and other agencies to leverage on the park connectors to enable cyclists to get to public transport interchanges more easily. Bicycle parking facilities at the MRT stations and bus interchanges in housing estates will be improved.

47 The cyclists also shared their ‘war stories’ and asked us to help improve safety on our roads. Following a pilot in Changi, LTA will put up signs to alert motorists to the presence of cyclists along frequently used cycling routes such as those in West Coast and Thomson from March 08. LTA and the Traffic Police have also started a trial to allow cycling on pedestrian footways in Tampines.

48 But at the end of the day, it is also an issue of mutual accommodation – for the motorists to look out for cyclists on the road; and for cyclists to have a care for pedestrians.

OK, token statement of ‘don’t kill them!’ in #48. #44 I find quite disappointing: the ‘growing interest in cycling’ is summarised as ‘more people cycling for recreation, or to get around the neighbourhood’. Transitioning to cycling as the main mode of transport (i.e. more than just pedalling the 1km to your local supermarket) is not mentioned. I wasn’t expecting it to; but it does show that we have a long way to go before it’s an acceptable part of one’s lifestyle.

#45: Still no normal bikes on trains, and foldable bikes allowed only on a ‘trial’. And again more encouragement to use park connectors to get to places, and only to local public transport interchanges. I don’t like park connectors for commuting for the simple reason that you have to go really slowly to avoid endangering other users on them. And they also have the unsatisfactory connotation that bicycles belong in parks, as toys, not as vehicles.

To end on a less sour note, this is better than the nothing that I’d expected from the Land Transport Review, but the mindset of Bicycles=Toys still permeates the minister’s speech.

So SMRT has responded to letters from ST readers complaining that the shuttle buses deployed during the recent breakdown had drivers who got lost and took more than an hour to make trips that would have taken only a few minutes by train. However, SMRT’s letter does not address the issues of unsatisfactory bus service. They merely reiterate that they had responded quickly, deployed all the staff they had, deployed all the buses they could get, etc. Not a word on the poor set-up of the replacement bus services or the incompetent drivers.

Letters below the fold.
Continue reading ‘Dodging the Question’

By zm the studious bloke:

from the annual report, passenger trips have increased 11% from 2002 - 389.7m to 434.9m. However, car kilometres operated dropped from 81.4m to 77.1m. SMRTC has been aggressively cutting costs by cramming as much as people into each train and reducing frequencies since 2004, to maximise shareholder value.

You can download SMRT’s annual report here.

I have excerpted the relevant table from the 2007 annual report:

This shows that the more crowded trains aren’t just an illusion of grumpy commuters. Average operating car occupancy rose by more than 10% between 2002 and 2007.

Now look at their financial statistics:

Railway EBITDA per car kilometre, a measure of profit, rose by more than 10% as well between 2002 and 2007. Total car kilometres had dropped, but by only about 5%, so overall their profits rose.

All this makes their following self-praise rather nauseating:

You know that someone is lying through his teeth when he uses the phrase ‘quantum leap’.

How are they going to enforce the ‘cars must give way to buses coming out of bus bay’ rule? When they wanted to enforce the bus lane hours, they once installed cameras on buses so they could take photos of cars that were in front of them. But taking photos of cars zipping past in the next lane is much more difficult. I have this uneasy feeling that this rule may be about as useful as the present ‘please give way’ signs on the back of buses.

The Land Transport Review is coming out in two parts. I have a hunch it will contain little or nothing about bicycles. How long must we wait before “multi-modal” transport includes bicycles?

This was one of the most unpleasant Malaysian hiking trips I’ve done — not difficult, but decidedly unpleasant.

Gunung Rajah is a 1683m mountain in the Main Range of Peninsular Malaysia. From its summit, one can purportedly see several of the Titiwangsa peaks. To get there, one can take a taxi from Bentong, which is in turn a 1 hour bus ride from Kuala Lumpur.

Thanks to a bus screw-up, we started walking at 10.30am instead of 9am as planned. The first two hours are spent along a muddy, flattish, and boring logging trail, basically cut into the steep slope of the river’s gorge. After that the terrain alternates between stretches of scratchy fern-fields (the path is not well-cleared) and your typical jungle paths. It’s still only gently sloping, and this is perhaps the only part before mid-afternoon where one is far away enough from the river that one cannot hear it.

After about an hour of this one finds oneself back on the slope of the gorge, with the gushing rapids below drowning out any cries you might make to teammates who are too far front/back. The path gets steep and muddy, with leeches in the rainy season. With sufficient vigilance I was able to flick off all the leeches I saw on myself before they bit, but unbeknownst to me one had found its way to my butt and would gorge itself there for some time before I discovered it in mid-afternoon. The path is narrow and one has to cross many fallen trees. Very good practice for your classic ’step cut into tree trunk’ crossing maneuver. It is a good idea to bring a smallish backpack for this trek, because the constant squeezing under fallen trees or past rattan trees rather inconvenienced those of us with big backpacks. On several occasions I had to get people behind me to detach my backpack from a persistent rattan branch. During the monsoon season, it was extremely slippery, and since we were on a narrow path on a rather steep slope looking down into the gorge, this made me a little nervous. One quickly becomes sick of the gush of the river below; I have never climbed any other mountain in Malaysia where one spends such a long time along the slope of a gorge. The terrain was not particularly steep so we were not gaining much in altitude but had to move slowly because of the narrow path, interfering vegetation, and slippery mud.

Two river crossings are entailed. My suspicion is that in the dry season, one can do this without getting one’s feet wet, but the river was quite full in December, so wading was unavoidable. As a result, my feet were wet for the rest of the day, and even though I changed into dry socks in camp, they still felt cold and wet throughout the night.

After the trail finally departs from the river (this is the second last water point before the summit), it turns ‘friendly’ for an hour of so. That is, less slippery, and steadily uphill but not so steep as to require scrambling. Kind of what one would typically expect on a sub-1500m Malaysian mountain. You then come upon the ‘false summit’, a pleasant clearing in which someone has constructed a ‘bench’. After the false summit there is a short stretch of going downhill, after which it’s uphill all the way. The terrain starts getting nasty at this point. Instead of firm soil one is now trekking on a kind of matted weave of soil, plant fibres, and tree roots. It is slightly bouncy and strong enough to take your weight, but your walking stick goes right through it. You are in the clouds so everything is wet. To compound the general instability and slipperiness, the trees become shorter and more fragile, so you need to be very careful about selecting your handholds and footholds when scrambling. At one stage you have to traverse a landslide. That in itself is alright, but at a fork just before the landslide, where both the left and right paths take you the the landslide, I unwittingly picked the more treacherous left side, which overlooks a sheer rock face that seems to go down the entire face of the mountain. A little higher up on the rock face you can see ropes going across it, and I didn’t want to think about traversing that rock face in such slippery conditions. Thankfully, it turned out that we didn’t have to do it.

We did, however, have to scramble up an extremely slippery short stretch of rock right after the landslide. There was a rope to help us, but it too was slippery. Waiting for everyone to negotiate that took some time. It was already well past 6pm at this point.

There was scarcely any room for everyone to stop at the junction to the last water source. It was a short distance off the main path, but one had to inch along a dodgy-looking, slippery tree trunk to get there. It was a pretty little mini-waterfall with mineral-tinged golden water, just like on Tahan. Since the path was so narrow we formed a ‘bottle chain’ passing empty and filled bottles to and fro from the water source to the main path. That took up more time than we would have liked, and it was getting dangerously dark.

From the last water source to the summit (where we were camping) is supposed to be an hour. I have no idea how long we took (it became too dark to read my watch, even supposing I wanted to depress myself by doing so), but I suspect it was significantly longer than that. We were tired by a long day and the darkness made it difficult to negotiate already demanding terrain. I learned to figure out where to step by ‘feeling’ around with my foot before putting my weight on it, and it didn’t seem to be any less efficient than my previous sight-driven strategy. We camped at a series of clearings just below the summit rock. It was quite a squeeze to pitch even my two-man tent in half of one of the clearings; I had to make do with an unsatisfactorily floppy flysheet. The wind was vicious, everything was wet, and everyone was getting into everyone’s way as we set up camp. Eventually, though, dinner was cooked and consumed, and I could retreat under shelter for an uncomfortable night.

I went up to the summit rock in the morning. There was no view whatsoever as we were still swathed in clouds (and moisture).

Going down wasn’t much better. I took a wrong turn shortly before the landslide, leading us to the wrong side of the sheer rock face going down the entire side of the mountain. Like we saw from below yesterday, there was a rope going across the rock face, but we figured we’d better backtrack and find the ‘right’ way to get to the other side of the rock face. The terrain seemed more difficult than it was in the dark last night and I was pretty weary by the time we got to the slippery rock section. I slid down the rock section on my chest because I had no grip on either the rope or the rock face (I miraculously escaped ropeburn).

There really isn’t anything of note on the way down. It was bloody slippery and I fell down more times than I care to count, leaving cuts galore on my shins. My palms were punctured, too, from gripping thorny things. We were reacquainted with leeches. It rained quite heavily at certain points. The logging trail seemed interminable. We were late enough to miss the last bus from Bentong to KL. Half of us managed to get a taxi to KL from Bentong, but the other half had to stay in Bentong for the night.

This could be a pleasant mountain to climb when it’s dry, but it’s literally and metaphorically a washout during the monsoon.

Full photo set here.

I visited Kampung Lorong Buangkok, the last kampong still standing in mainland Singapore, this morning. Pretty much as I expected, vicious mosquitoes included (SAF insect repellent works on them).

Some highlights:

Incongruous discarded TV:

Buddha with head hacked open:

Unfortunately there’s nothing inside (maybe there was something inside):

Typical kampong scene (actually no, since all the humans in this picture are visitors from civilisation):

A suggestive path leading from the kampung to Ordinary Life in a government flat:

1. It rained again. And again, undisciplined me could not force myself to continue, even though I’ve hiked in much worse conditions before. Instead I took a long break at North View Hut and then proceeded on with umbrella. Yes, I am ashamed of myself.

2. I saw the girl with the heavy pack, ankle weights, and two poles again. This time I asked what she was training for. “Everest” was the reply. Her current pack is 15kg. She definitely needs to increase it. She’s already going pretty slowly.

3. I weighed my pack again. It’s now up to 12kg, and that was after depleting my water supplies by approximately 1kg. Also, I’ve lost 2kg in the last six months. Didn’t expect that — I’ve definitely not been pushing myself to my limits during trainings.

4. I broke something in my Komperdell walking stick. The lowest section now can’t be retracted, nor can it be tightened so as to lock it in place. It still stays in the same place because of friction, so it’s still usable. Less portable though. I’ll use it to death for my trainings, use it for Tahan if it’s still usable by then, and turn to its partner when it dies.

5. I’ve noticed that there is a damn lot of deforestation in Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. There are huge clearings where there used to be trees before. On the Dairy Farm slope the construction of the new stepped path seems to have opened the surroundings to invasion by ferns, which are known to be so aggressive that trees will not be able to colonise the area again without external intervention. The part of Catchment Path near the pipeline clearing seems to have lots of fallen trees, and looks like a war zone after storms. The nature reserve was probably doomed from the start due to its small size and the BKE cutting it off from the rest of the Central Catchment Area. But the increased foot traffic in the nature reserve must have speeded up the deforestation process. I think it’s great that more and more people are visiting the nature reserve. But our nature reserves are so small and isolated that I suspect these visits will result in their eventual demise. How long before they basically become parks with short stunted trees and cowgrass?