One Less Car

From a certain Khoo Chun Yok, in the ST Forum:

Why are void decks so, er, void?

HDB void decks strike me as under-used spaces.
Is this due to:

• Fire hazard?
• Insufficient human traffic?
• Lack of air-conditioning?
• Our collective love of blank walls?
• HDB restrictions on commercial use?
• Our national obsession with shopping centres?
• Need to have space for the occasional wedding or funeral?
• Need to let second-storey residents enjoy a little peace and quiet?

Whatever the reasons, it is a great pity that so much public space should be left void, empty. A cafe would be nice. Or perhaps a bookstore. A newsstand, perhaps.

If rent is low - and why shouldn’t it be, the space is empty anyway - these small businesses could survive, and give us an alternative to shopping centres.

Public spaces need to be occupied, for them to belong to the public.

I am sorry, but a newsstand, a bookstore or a cafe is not space that belongs to the public. The owners of such establishments can dictate what kind of behaviour is allowed in their premises, who is allowed to enter their premises, what times the premises are available to the public, and so on. In fact, such places are commonly known as pseudo-public spaces:

…pseudo-public spaces include Malls, theme parks, and sports stadiums. A pseudo-public space resembles a public space with its diversity of people. But Malls, stadiums, and theme parks are privatized spaces that are “sanitized” of certain elements. Attempts to control free speech in public spaces pale in comparison to the success of pseudo-public spaces in controlling speech. For example, most Malls prohibit leafleting or making speeches. Mall security guards routinely remove homeless people as well as anyone wearing what they deem to be gang colors. As a private space, Malls can control speech and looks. They can “sanitize” their environment. And they can prohibit activities that do not lead to their raison d’etre — consuming commodities.

Well, it seems that the only notion of ‘useful’ public space Khoo Chun Yok has is that which forwards the goal of consuming commodities.

In today’s Today:

How can Singaporeans be encouraged to cycle more if they’re not safe on roads?

Tuesday • June 17, 2008

Letter from SHARON LIM

LAST Friday night, I was on a Tibs bus service 61 (TIBS777A) travelling from Holland Village towards the Bukit Batok bus interchange.

As the bus neared Maju Road, just before the Singapore Institute of Management, the bus came up behind two male cyclists. They were wearing helmets and bright clothes and had rear lights installed on their bicycles.

Instead of slowing down or trying to overtake the cyclist, the bus driver began blasting his horn at them continuously. He tailgated the two cyclists that at times, it seemed as if the bus was breathing down their necks.

When the bus stopped at Ngee Ann Polytechnic to allow passengers to board, the two cyclists caught up and started shouting vulgarities at the driver. The bus driver got out and a minor scuffle broke out before some passengers separated them.

If the authorities are serious about encouraging Singaporeans to cycle to work or school, shouldn’t they also ensure that cyclists are treated as rightful road users?

But if cyclists cannot ride on the pavement and are in danger of being knocked down by inconsiderate road users, how are they going to use their bicycles as a means of transport?

What I will write here is a partial explanation for why I am such an angry idealist. Not the ‘idealist’ part, because I was always that, but the ‘angry’ part.

The anger comes when goals that you work hard for are undermined by people who claim some sort of moral high ground in doing so. When your painstaking preparation is dismissed as insufficient by people who have absolutely no expertise in the field in question. When the value in what you do is dismissed again by those who are unfamiliar with the field in question and in any case have no notion of value other than monetary and social status.

It comes when the suffering you went through is tossed aside at will by these people, and you can do nothing but rage helplessly, because knowledge is not power — plenty of ignorant shits are in power. When people belittle your hard work on the basis of gender/sex alone, notwithstanding that you went through everything that your counterparts with in supposedly stronger gender/sex did.

When people who claim to be ‘doing things for your own good’ reveal themselves to be using you as know more than a tool for their own self-gratification, for if they gave a shit about your mental well-being would they really choose to teach you that hard work should be compensated for by the complete slaughtering of your dreams by those who do not even attempt to understand those dreams? “I don’t care that you’ve spent 400 hours of your life on this, gone through extremes of mental and physical suffering, including second degree burns all over your palms that I could not have failed to notice; this unknown thing that you want to do gives me the heebie-jeebies, therefore, for your own good, I shall forcibly stop you from doing it.” Certainly breeds respect for these enforcers, doesn’t it? Certainly breeds faith in the correlation between social seniority and wisdom. Perhaps those who lament the lack of “respect for elders” in today’s society would want to reflect more on why that is happening, instead of shunting the blame onto Evil Western Culture?

From that I learned that the most worthy ideals and intentions, the most thorough preparation and justification, can be shot down at will by those who have the power to do so. That by itself isn’t why it is so enraging. It is enraging because the same idiots doing it paint themselves as saints for doing so. Politics as usual, y’know. As it was possibly my first try at anything resembling a coherent long-term effort towards a goal that I cared about, it was not particularly encouraging. As a chronic idealist, I was not discouraged from my ideals, but I was certainly divested of a large portion of any optimism about people I still had left at that point.

It was perhaps one incident, but the pattern kept repeating. On small and large scales. Everywhere, there would be ignorant, arrogant pricks who could not reason to save their life scuppering other people’s dreams for petty reasons. Mostly what in this society would be termed ‘pragmatic’ reasons. And some of the worst offenders are those who are charged with nurturing the future workers of our society. But society is constituted in such a way that these people would be praised, rewarded, for dream-killing. For ambition-killing. ‘That person has his feet on the ground,’ observers would remark approvingly.

Those who keep their feet on the ground for too long eventually become permanently rooted to that one spot. When that becomes your exemplar of a good life, it’s no surprise that society remains in an infantile state. They haven’t even snipped their umbilical cords.

My latest spiel in response to another of those fatalists, whom I spotted on a Cycling in Singapore post. As is sadly too common here, the fatalist in question insists that cycling to work will never be a widespread habit in Singapore due to the weather, the prevailing culture, current traffic conditions, etc. Now, the weather I can’t change, but I think it’s still a darn sight better than the weather in the American Midwest. Try cycling in sub-zero weather with 40km/h winds. Go observe the number of people cycle-commuting in places like Chicago and Ann Arbor. Then come back and tell me that you can’t create a significant bike commuting population in Singapore. Furthermore, people who bring up the weather fail to realise that the factor at issue is people’s willingness to tolerate the weather, not the weather itself. And people’s level of tolerance certainly can be changed.

As for other factors like traffic conditions and culture, it’s all too obvious that those can be changed too. But I will leave my case for those to be made by the comment I posted at Cycling in Singapore:

I strongly object to KY’s fatalistic view about promoting cycling to work. Of course, *right now* there are few people who cycle to work (as opposed to simply around their neighborhood), and *right now* it’s rather dangerous to cycle on many roads. But a major reason that few people cycle to work is that it’s dangerous. So we are in a chicken-and-egg situation, where the authorities refuse to build certain facilities because they claim there is no demand for it, yet there is no demand for them because the lack of facilities creates a prevailing situation where the product offered (bike commuting) is perceived as inferior. The economic concept of induced demand is relevant here — it’s basically the same mechanism that explains why adding lanes to expressways doesn’t relieve congestion (the initially faster traffic induces more people to use the expressway, eventually bringing traffic back to pre-expansion congestion levels).

People tend to naively think that bike-friendly cities in the West arose because the transport authorities spotted a significant existing demand for bikes and hence built bike-friendly infrastructure. In fact, the real situation is more complicated. Typically, it’s the efforts of a minority of cycling enthusiasts that push the authorities into bike-friendly measures. One bike lane at a time. But with each bike lane laid down, the mass of cyclists grows, as cycling becomes a more attractive option. As they grow, it gets progressively easier to make their case for more bike-friendly infrastructure. And so on. But at the start, there will be a ‘bootstrapping’ stage where a minority has to make the case for facilities for which the demand hasn’t ‘matured’. It’s a pretty commonsense notion really. Build the lanes, and the cyclists will appear.

Finally, I think it is incredibly short-sighted to claim that only low-income workers and crazy Westerners or Western-influenced Singaporeans will cycle to work. I think it’s pretty evident to everyone that oil prices, and hence the price of motorized transport, are going to increase steadily. It’s also notable that even in a society as car-crazy as America, bike commuting has been steadily increasing. This is not some kind of one-off cultural phenomenon. It is a signal of deep, albeit long-term, economic forces at work. If we choose to ignore it and plan only for short-term accommodation rather than long-term structural change, we will pay the price eventually.

It’s funny that KY rants about how people would not cycle to work if they were paid to. Well I think at some point in the not too distant future cyclists will effectively be paid to cycle to work — simply by virtue of the price differential between cycling and other transport options. And making cycling to work safer and more comfortable is also a way of ‘paying’ cyclists to do so, just not in monetary terms.

There is an insidious, self-defeating assumption here that Singaporean culture and Singaporeans’ attitudes towards cycling will never change — that women will always view it as the equivalent of menial labour fit only for construction workers, etc. Well of course if you go around saying that all the time and using that as an excuse for not pushing hard for cycling as a major mode of transport, then of course your predictions will come true. No change is going to happen when people go around saying that change is impossible. This comes back to the point that cycling-friendly cities (in the States especially) did not arise because there were already a bike-loving populations slavering for bike lanes. Rather, such cities became bike friendly because the starting minority of bike enthusiasts managed to get their ideas out and change the mindsets of people around them. The pre-existing culture was and is being changed in those places. To assume from the start that S’porean mindsets cannot be similarly changed is to make a self-fulfilling prophecy. Only people who believe things can change can change things.

*I was sorely tempted to title this post ‘Yes we can‘, but decided it would be too cheesy. For all that I distrust politicians, I think there is something in the Obama campaign’s line.

Since it’s been a few days since I sent them, I assume that they won’t be published.

Letter #1:

Dear Editor,

I refer to the letter “Aesthetic guidelines: Leave it to the doctor” (ST, March 25) by Mr Oh. The role of the doctor is to prevent and
treat health problems. Aesthetic problems are not necessarily health problems. Ugly skin and ugly hair are not always symptoms of poor health, and when they are, they should be tackled by removing the root cause, rather than by removing only the symptoms. Excess fat should be combated by dieting and exercising, rather than by short-term fat-removal. Furthermore, it is not a general practitioner’s job to help his patients “become more self-confident”. If someone is having issues with his self-esteem, he should be seeing a psychiatrist, not going for aesthetic treatments.

Furthermore, Mr Oh draws a false dichotomy when he asks if the authorities would prefer that “consumers go to questionable sources of aesthetic treatment”. The whole point of the recent discoveries of malpractice and misinformation by GPs offering aesthetic treatment is that some GPs have themselves become “questionable sources”. As it is, both GPs and beauty treatment salons offer treatments that are scientifically unsubstantiated. But surely we should expect the medical profession to differentiate themselves from unscrupulous entrepreneurs by demanding a higher threshold of evidence for the treatments they offer. Only then will the consumer be able to reliably differentiate between doctors and the pseudo-doctors of beauty salons.

Finally, Mr Oh’s mention of Viagra as an example of a medically sanctioned drug that does not have “purely medical benefits” is
misleading. The relevant difference between Viagra and some of the aesthetic treatments recently highlighted by the media is that Viagra has passed double-blind clinical trials, and said treatments haven’t. In other words, Viagra has been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be effective for the condition it claims to treat, whereas those aesthetic treatments have not.

Letter #2:

Dear Editor,

I refer to Mrs Susan Yeo’s letter, “Ensure zero tolerance for danger by schools”. Mrs Yeo complains that prior to school-organised activities, parents are often given indemnity forms to sign, thereby absolving the school of responsibility for accidents during said activities. However, she is concerned that some of these activities might be unsafe. In this case, the obvious solution should be to simply not sign the indemnity or consent forms, hence ensuring that her child will not be involved any activities that she deems unsafe. Instead of taking this obvious action, though, Mrs Yeo would prefer that schools refrain from organising activities “with any element of danger”. She thinks that safer activities can provide the “same learning experience” for students.

Apart from the absurd notion that activities such as sports, all of which involve risks of physical harm, should be banned from schools, she is mistaken that safer activities can indeed provide the “same learning experience”. Suppose that the purpose of organizing camping expeditions is to teach the students outdoor survival skills. How else does Mrs Yeo propose to impart such skills other than by taking the students into the wilderness and bringing them into contact with the actual challenges posed by the natural environment? Virtual reality technology has not advanced to the extent that we can simulate entire rainforests and mountains, and however often you pitch a tent in the school field, it is simply not the same as doing so in the rainforest. Similarly, it is hard to imagine how one can teach students open-water canoeing without actually canoeing in open water.

The more disturbing aspect of Mrs Yeo’s proposal, however, is that she wishes to deprive other students of the chance to undergo the learning experiences she so deplores. Just because she is afraid that her child will come to harm, she would propose that an entire nation of children be deprived of the opportunity to learn more about nature, to acquire useful outdoors skills, and to improve their mental resilience. These are just a few of the many unique learning experiences that can be provided by outdoor activities. Under the guise of concern for students’ safety, Mrs Yeo ends up selfishly insisting that her child should be protected from all possible harm by depriving other children of the opportunities to develop themselves.

Letter #2 concerns an issue that particularly rankles with me. I hate to sound like an old hag but “youngsters nowadays” often seem too pampered to me. The more parents are unwilling to let their children actually get into situations of genuine strife and suffering (as one does regularly in endurance sports), the more likely it is that we will transform into a nation of oversized babies. It also seems that many parents, including my own, are reluctant to stop babying their offspring. In fact, they find the idea that they should cut them loose insulting — they find offensive any suggestion that their children could cope without them. But surely your having bred an independent child should be more cause for pride than your having to provide continual care for them. It all falls into place, though, if you accept the premise that most of these people are merely bringing up trophy children. It’s all about how they are manifested through their offspring, not about enabling new, independent minds. Once their children get out of their control, they can no longer force their personalities to be manifested through the little critters. And that’s what distresses them.

Arson and Arsenic reports that motorbike driving instructors tell their students that it’s illegal for cyclists to be on the roads.

Today was my first time attempting to cycle to work at 9am. I think whatever health benefits I gathered from the exercise were probably cancelled out by the pollution. Furthermore, it was a bitch trying to filter right. Two big filters that I have problems with are along Thomson Road (to turn into Chancery Lane) and Holland Road (to turn into North Buona Vista Road). When I stick to my usual starting time of 6am, I have no problems making those turns. Today at around 9.30am the traffic along Thomson Road was heavy and slow. Bloody taxi honked at me when I tried to filter right, even though there was a huge gap between it and the car in front, and I was travelling about as fast as the rest of the traffic on the road. And even after I’d successfully filtered, I had to wait a bloody long time before there was a gap in the traffic in the opposite direction that allowed me to turn into Chancery Lane. I should have just taken Lornie Road, hills and all. At Holland Road I had to take two pedestrian crossings to turn right.

He’s not a fan of the Tampines bicycle trial either:

Another reason why you don’t need a trial: just look at how other cities have dealt with the problem, especially in Europe. There, dedicated bicycle paths are commonly provided, separate from pedestrian ways. Is it not obvious, the social benefits of that?

I’ve made the same point many times, to people who think that sidewalk bicycling is viable in the long term. If you look at the most cyclist-friendly cities in the world, they are those in which cyclists are allowed space on the roads, not those where they are confined to sidewalks. Why did they waste money laying down extra-wide sidewalks in Tampines for bicycles, instead of the cheaper, more commonly used worldwide, and more obvious solution of painting bike lanes on the roads there?

Part of the answer, I suspect, lies with the tremendous political inertia that lies with Singaporean motorists, who still have an extraordinary sense of entitlement about road space.

That despite being unimpressed with most of the Eastern Coastal Park Connector Network, I still think it’s a good development, because it’ll encourage more cycling for leisure purposes, which is an important step towards inching cycling into people’s daily lifestyles.

It’s not often that one finds sentences in the ST Forum that hit the nail on the head. This is one of those rare ones, illustrating why I think Singapore might (ironically) have more of a cultural barrier than the ostensibly car-crazy Americans in shifting away from private motor transport:

For many Singaporeans, owning a car is more than about convenience; it is also about status. I know many car owners that are willing to spend more on the car than on their child’s education.

The letter writer also points out the negative externalities of driving, including the subsidized (?) parking HDB provides to its residents. I don’t think HDB necessarily has to sell parking lots — appropriately high rental prices should account for the negative externalities of carparks.

Read the whole thing here.

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?