Thursday, 10 January 2008

Massive jam at TPE

There was a massive traffic jam this morning at TPE. I was stuck in the jam for 1 hour 40min. My usual traveling time is 40min. That means I wasted 1 hour in the jam. This is a record for me and in certain way, it is also the first sign of trouble.

I think people living in this city has slowly realised that the road is not as smooth as previously now. Wherever you go, there are cars and people. Congestion is slowly becoming a big problem.

The contributing factors to this situation are

  • Good economy, everybody can afford a car
  • Government releasing more COE and lower the cost of ownership
  • Policy shift of using ERP to control the traffic instead of COE
There is a serious flaw here. Because there are too many rich people in Singapore who are willing to pay the few dollars ERP charge. As a result, bus commuter also stuck in the jam. The limited MRT network also doesn't help the situation.

What if you bring up the ERP charges, install more gantry, but still releasing so many COE? Curb the vehicle growth. Come 2009, what welcome the world riches at IR could be traffic jam instead of the entertainment.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

They're in the process of transferring ownership cost to usage cost. In the future, cars would cost very cheap to buy and park but cost a lot to drive. So that would eliminate those unnecessary cars on the road. It may cost up to $30 a trip? You may say thats a lot but when COE was at its peak, it cost just about that to own it - park or drive. But of course if you paid $100K for it one shot, you would drive. But once the cost of driving a trip was thrown at your face, then only the people who could really afford it would drive to work.

Anonymous said...

The above comment is quite smiliar to some comments I have read in some other blog posts related to ERP and LTA.

I guess that the troops are out to put their message across.

Remember the identity is not important as mentioned by one esteemed minister.

We will start to have any LTA/ERP blog posts to be visited by these troopers working behind the scenes.

Abao said...

yups. I'd experienced it on Friday as well when I was going home (sengkang bound). The massive jam stretched all the way from parts of Tampines Road to half of the TPE...

Alen said...

ya, I think it is getting out of hand already. every morning I spent so much time on jam and I have no other alternative.

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