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Technology

Singapore To Increase Road Capacity By Tracking All Vehicles With GPS 40

Singapore plans to boost road capacity by 20,000 vehicles through a new satellite-based road pricing system, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) announced last week. The city-state will replace its current gantry-based Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system with GPS tracking technology, enabling more precise congestion management without physical toll stations. The Register adds: "ERP 2.0 will provide more comprehensive aggregated traffic information and will be able to operate without physical gantries. We will be able to introduce new 'virtual gantries,' which allow for more flexible and responsive congestion management," explained the LTA.

But the island's government doesn't just control inflow into urban areas through toll-like charging -- it also aggressively controls the total number of cars operating within its borders. Singapore requires vehicle owners to bid for a set number of Certificates of Entitlement -- costly operating permits valid for only ten years. The result is an increase of around SG$100,000 ($75,500) every ten years, depending on that year's COE price, on top of a car's usual price. The high total price disincentivizes mass car ownership, which helps the government manage traffic and emissions.

Singapore To Increase Road Capacity By Tracking All Vehicles With GPS

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  • will get side road vs main highway wrong and stick the bill on you for the highway when you are really on the side road?

    • will get side road vs main highway wrong and stick the bill on you for the highway when you are really on the side road?

      Don't try to dispute it....

      It isn't worth fighting the ticket over getting "cained" .....

      ;)

    • will get side road vs main highway wrong

      GPS is usually accurate enough to determine which lane you're in, but accuracy can be improved a thousandfold by using Differential GPS [wikipedia.org] waypoints at major intersections.

  • You solve traffic by getting fewer vehicles on the road.

    • A Toyota Camry, alongside the required license to own a car, costs $183,000 in Singapore. That's no exaggeration, and that's US dollars. I guess a 250% tax and $106k for the right to own a vehicle helps reduce traffic too. Reference: https://www.reuters.com/busine... [reuters.com]

  • Nice move of the city-state-sized Chinese sweatshop named Singapore; they're trying to increase work productivity even more! The fami-Lee will be content!

    • Singapore a sweatshop? Seriously? Their unemployment rate this year is under 2% .. why would anyone work at a sweatshop when there are businesses desperate to hire people there.

      • by quenda ( 644621 )

        why would anyone work at a sweatshop when there are businesses desperate to hire people there.

        Because they are not citizens. It came out during Covid that Singapore has huge numbers of foreign workers living in squalid, crowded dormitories.

        https://www.channelnewsasia.co... [channelnewsasia.com]

  • Just buy the routing service from Google and give them direct access to your construction and accident reporting DBs. Mandate its use by all vehicles on your roads.

    You'll have traffic distributed across all available routes in more or less the most efficient manner possible without having automated control of all vehicles. With the API you get with that purchase, you can track everyone and tax 'em to cover road wear and discourage unnecessary trips.

    Then you can get more exotic and mandate smaller vehicles

  • Especially when that's gonna be extremely expensive for marginal gains compared to transit expansion and more cycleways. Most people don't need to drive and only do so out of a lack of better options, and would rather do without the expense and hassle of car ownership and storage. Not hard to rent a car when you don't have one but need it for a trip or two when you have transit. Hard to catch a bus when your city doesn't invest in transportation and expects everyone to bring farm equipment into the equat
    • by rossdee ( 243626 )

      " expects everyone to bring farm equipment into the equation."

      I don't think there are farms in Singapore.

      • I don't think there are farms in Singapore.

        There are several hundred farms in Singapore, nearly all in the northwest corner. They grow mostly fresh, perishable produce.

        There are many marine fish farms in Singaporean territorial waters.

    • Regardless of how many cycleways or transit they have, they will still have roads. And when there are roads, they will become congested unless something is done to manage the congestion, like road pricing.

      It's a myth that you can build enough transit or cycleways to alleviate car congestion. It's junk economics. If X of people leave the congested roads and ride their bike or the subway, that's great. But now that the road is less congested, X more people will decide to drive now. I'm not saying subways and
      • It's a myth that you can build enough transit or cycleways to alleviate car congestion.

        Building transit that doesn't get stuck in traffic [youtu.be] alleviates car congestion, or at least sets an upper limit on how much gridlock people will tolerate before they switch to transit. Run it on 10 minute headways or better during peak travel periods so people don't have to carefully time when they leave the house, and run it 24/7 so people don't get stranded if they miss the last bus or train.

      • Regardless of how many cycleways or transit they have, they will still have roads. And when there are roads, they will become congested unless something is done to manage the congestion, like road pricing.

        There is truth to the idea that congestion is a self-limiting marketplace. Roads are only congested to the degree the people creating the congestion are willing to suffer the consequences.

        It's a myth that you can build enough transit or cycleways to alleviate car congestion. It's junk economics. If X of people leave the congested roads and ride their bike or the subway, that's great. But now that the road is less congested, X more people will decide to drive now.

        That presumes that driving is preferable to using transit/cycling/walking and the ONLY reason people don't drive is congestion. But that isn't true.

        There are other advantages to all those other modes but those advantages depend in part on how robust the infrastructure is supporting them. If a bus runs by your house ever 1

      • Congestion pricing doesn't work, unless the goal is to line toll operator's pockets. Induced demand is real, and the inverse is true as well. You cannot add more lanes your way out of congestion, but you absolutely can solve car congestion by removing lanes [wikipedia.org]. The only solution to car congestion is reasonable transportation infrastructure, which means more ways to get around that don't involve bringing farm machinery like cars into the city.
  • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @04:51PM (#64919587)
    The entire country is less than 25 miles wide ... you can walk from the Johor Strait on the West to the Airport on the East in 8 hours. Or take the train -- they have 150 miles of commuter rail tucked into their 25 mile wide roughly semi-circular country. There is no point in the country where you are more than 3 miles from a train station.
    • Yet Singapore has been on the cutting edge of surveillance for a long time - 90,000 cameras with 200,000 planned by 2030. All have analytics, facial recognition data, etc.

      • The word "yet" at the start of the sentence implies that what you are saying will disagree with a point the parent made. Instead your post is completely off topic. Start your own thread.

  • Limiting who uses the road might make sense, but selling access in 10 year chunks makes it much less logical.

    Feels like an excuse to extract more money by claiming to solve problems you should have fixed other ways (like by zoning and urban planning).

  • The popular meme of comparing nations which have little in common is used to sell ideas which suit tiny nation-states but are not applicable to countries of size.

    Kudos to Singapore for imposing civilization with sufficient force to make it stick but geography and culture are why they're able to.

  • ... about the same size as GPS CEP?

"It's like deja vu all over again." -- Yogi Berra

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