A greener transportation system in Singapore.

Singapore has a long way to catch up when we talk about having a greener environment. Although we pay a lot of lip service to it. In reality, we are far behind compare to many other countries and especially many cities in China.

I always expect to have polluted airs in China but when I travel to some of the cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, I realise they can teach us a few things about going green yet beneficial for the business community.

Firstly, most of their public buses are already electric, E bike with a rear cargo cart are allowed for transportation of parcels and other goods for small businesses, another green way of doing business. They even have E bike to pick up passenger with creative umbrellas made to shelter passengers from the hot or wet weather. All these will definitely be very feasible for a small country like Singapore

Walking along the pavement is such a breeze with no smell of combustion exhaust(which is also bad for our health) from the road, unlike Singapore.

Motorcycle is almost obsolete in some cities and there many mini etrucks/eBike with cargo box, replacing the traditional big motor trucks. I still cannot understand why we are not implementing it except for legacy reasons such as government lost of revenue in taxes and COE.

While our government is promoting carlite, in Singapore, more and more commercial trucks and private hire vehicle are plying our roads with the rise of ecommerce, the sharing economy like Uber and Grab did not actually reduce vehicles on the road which we can witness from the COE bidding when they first came in.

Also, many of these foreign truck drivers bring with them their driving habit and some of them are  not following our traffic rules making it an unpleasant driving experience for many who obey the rules.

I would like to hear from our Ministry of Transport what they have in place to make Singapore a greener and better place to work, live and play.

While I understand COE and vehicle taxes are very lucrative revenue for our government, we should not let this stop us from going greener in our transportation and along the way reducing cost of business. Proper regulation and certain fee collection can still bring in some revenue and make Singapore a better to live and play.