One Less Car

Highlights from this Reuters article:

“It is very costly to get rid of our waste,” said Ong Chong Peng, general manger of the island’s only remaining landfill, which cost S$610 million ($447 million) to create on Pulau Semakau eight kilometers south of the mainland.

The landfill “island,” a 350-hectare feat of engineering reclaimed from the sea, opened the day after the last of five mainland landfills closed in 1999.

Every day it takes shipments of over 2,000 tonnes of ash — the charred remnants of 93 percent of Singapore’s rubbish, burnt at its four incinerators.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) predicts a new multimillion dollar incinerator will be needed every five to seven years, and a new landfill like Pulau Semakau every 25 to 30 years.

With nowhere to site another landfill, recycling, though not yet rolled out to the masses in condominiums or state Housing Development Board (HDB) skyscrapers, is no longer just nice to have, but a necessity, said Ong.

With Semakau landfill expected to be full by 2040, even those who have worked for decades in Singapore’s incineration industry agree the old burn-and-bury approach is unsustainable.

“We cannot keep building incinerator plants,” said Poh. “It’s not really the solution.”

Like the NEA, he says Singaporeans must change their mindset. “We need to get people aware of the environmental impact of their actions.”

Convincing people to buy less in a country whose “national pastime” is shopping is a hard win, he said.

This part annoyed me:

Incinerators have met with public resistance in neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia, and have been banned in the Philippines because of perceived health risks.

But the plants are sacred cows in Singapore, which opened its first in 1979, little commented on or questioned.

“Singaporeans understand and accept that because land is scarce, incineration is one of the most cost effective ways of waste disposal, as it can reduce the volume of waste by up to 90 percent,” the NEA said in a statement.

I’m sorry, but I doubt that a substantial proportion of Singaporeans ‘understand and accept’ the incineration situation. Most of them just consume and throw their waste without a thought to how it is being disposed of. Most of them would not have thought abotu the health risks of incineration. This statement is just a way to shift responsibility for a controversial decision that was made unilaterally by the government onto the people.

I have in my hands an anti-golf courses postcard addressed to the Minister for National Development. It’s part of a campaign organised by Grant Pereira and lists its website as www.thegreening.org, but that domain seems to be defunct now. Some interesting statistics stated on the postcard:

Today we have 23 golf courses and 3 driving ranges here. They take up about 1400 hectares (the size of 3 Yishun New Towns) or about 1750 football fields. Golf Courses here represent about 88% of land presently set aside for sports and recreation.

Although I am sympathetic to this cause, it’s not clear to me that constructing golf courses on land that was bought for private consumption constitutes a public wrong.

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?

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).

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?

Singapore’s last kampong will likely make way for more faceless flats and schools. (Via Singapore Surf)

Excerpts from this Salon article:

To Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, parking requirements are a bane of the country. “Parking requirements create great harm: they subsidize cars, distort transportation choices, warp urban form, increase housing costs, burden low income households, debase urban design, damage the economy, and degrade the environment,” he writes in his book, “The High Cost of Free Parking.”

Americans don’t object, because they aren’t aware of the myriad costs of parking, which remain hidden. In large part, it’s business owners, including commercial and residential landlords, who pay to provide parking places. They then pass on those costs to us in slightly higher prices for rent and every hamburger sold.

“Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else,” explains Shoup. “Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else’s expense, and we all enjoy our free parking, but our cars are choking our cities.”

[...]

The environmental impacts of all this parking go way beyond paving paradise. The impervious surfaces of parking lots accumulate pollutants, according to Bernie Engel, a professor of agricultural engineering at Purdue. Along with dust and dirt, heavy metals in the air like mercury, copper and lead settle onto the lots’ surfaces in a process called dry deposition. These particles come from all kinds of diffuse sources, such as industry smokestacks, automobiles and even home gas water heaters.

“If they were naturally settling on a tree or grass, they would wash off those and into the soil, and the soil would hold them in place, so they wouldn’t get into the local stream, lake or river,” Engel says.

But when the same substances settle on parking lots, rain washes them into streams, lakes and rivers. Engel calculates that the Tippecanoe land used for parking creates 1,000 times the heavy-metal runoff that it would if used for agriculture. Because the surface of the lots doesn’t absorb water, it also creates 25 times the water runoff that agricultural land would, which can increase erosion in local waterways.

Parking lots also contribute to the “urban heat island effect.” The steel, concrete and blacktops of buildings, roads and parking lots absorb solar heat during the day, making urban areas typically 2 to 5 degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside. “This is most apparent at nighttime, when the surrounding area is cooler, and the urban area starts radiating all this heat from the urban structures,” explains Dev Niyogi, an assistant professor at Purdue, who is the Indiana state climatologist.

The urban heat island effect can be so dramatic that it changes the weather. One Indianapolis study found that thunderstorms that reach the city often split in two, going around it, and merging again into one storm after the urban area. “The urban heat island is not simply a temperature issue. It could affect our water availability,” says Niyogi.

All right, there’s not much free parking in Singapore (which is a good thing), but whereever there is, you can see people ‘paying’ for it by wasting time and stressing themselves out hovering around the free parking spaces like vultures.

I’ve written about the aforementioned urban heat island effect many, many times on this blog. People say they don’t want to cycle or walk because it’s too hot here. But it would not be so hot here if these same people weren’t driving (and hence creating demand for roads and parking lots, contributing to the urban heat island effect). So as long as these people continue insisting on heat as a reason not to cycle, it’ll get hotter and hotter. And more people will use heat as an excuse to take private motorized transportation. So it goes.

The context.

The photos I took when passing by recently on my bike: