ERP draws more blood from our main arteries

I seem to have a bone to pick whenever it comes to our transportation system. In any case, Today didn't pick this up, which I wrote a couple of days back - too wordy, I suppose... :?

What really cheezed me off was that the counter arguements were right there, but nobody sieved it out! Two key points: An extra $2b from transport revenue (not evening counting COE), and the apparent lack of imagination on the part of LTA (or perhaps a dogged determination to believe that ERP really works).

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There is something decidedly disturbing when you run into a traffic jam while driving home from the city at 8pm.

Do Singaporeans really love their work so much that they stay so late? It would seem like they are avoiding their families on purpose. It makes even less sense when the government is encouraging better work-life balance.

But that is likely to be the common situation when the new Electronic Road Pricing charges kick in on Nov 1.

For sure, ERP as a method for easing traffic congestion is not unique in the world, but this probably is: A bitterly amusing attempt to regulate traffic that flows out of the city. Most countries would be concerned with overcrowding in their central business district, but we seem to be keener in keeping vehicles longer within the CBD.

Like it or not, some drivers will be inclined to stay back later in the office to avoid the additional $0.50 or $1 ERP charges they will have to pay every day. They would not be able to leave earlier, of course, since most people only leave work after 6pm, by which time the new charges would have kicked in.

But they will also not be able to keep it up for long. The toll on family life, or the same traffic jam that used to plague them at 6pm, would eventually force them to revert to their old timing and bear the additional cost.

The new ERP charges cover all the major arterial highways out of the city. To avoid these additional charges, drivers will have to take a longer drive on small roads. What happens when these small roads, already congested with traffic lights, start to get crowded, too? Will more ERP gantries be erected, as Ms Janice Tay fears (“Same old traffic-stopping story”, Today, Aug 25-26)? Not surprisingly, alternative egress routes like Holland Road and Bukit Timah Road are already being monitored for congestion.

It is hard to imagine, then, why the Land Transport Authority would look to ERP to solve our congestion problems. If anything, ERP has done nothing more than make traffic jams a predictable occurrence, which shifts with every change in timing, yet never removed.

Claiming that ERP works simply because traffic speed has increased borders on delusional, and we have yet to hear a logical case for the relationship. Contrarily, increased traffic speed can be due to many other reasons – crazy drivers, more powerful cars, halting of circle line construction, or better road works. The last reason is something that LTA should be proud of and should continue working towards, instead of toying around with ERP timings.

And while having five more ERP gantries that automatically activate when traffic speed falls below 20kmh might seem innovative, by no stretch of the imagination would these be of use in easing traffic congestion. Rather, they become a guessing game for drivers, and are of absolutely no use in route planning. It might even lead to more reckless driving as drivers jockey for the best escape route, just in case their speedometers drop below the mark.

What, then, is stopping LTA from coming up with other solutions? It cannot be for lack of funds. If we were to take the average cost of road license to be $800, with 680,000 cars on our roads, this would have generated $5.44 billion for LTA in the last decade. Not even counting the approximate $810 million collected from ERP charges since 1998, the $3.4 billion spent on improving our roads (not even factoring in what could have gone to building homes, industries and school) falls short of another $2 billion that LTA can draw on.

If Mr Raymond Lim believes that Singaporeans understand the compromise between smooth-flowing roads and car growth, then he might have overestimated our drivers’ understanding on why the road taxes they paid have not been plowed back in full to the same system.

Sadly, the perception that ERP is a responsibility that only drivers have to bear is a myopic attempt to deceive ourselves. Has LTA considered other economic and social consequences every time they decide to hike ERP charges?

For instance, if ERP eventually succeeds in forcing drivers off the roads into our public transport system, would it over-tax the network for those who don’t drive? Imagine if just half of 800,000 drivers, with passengers and baby prams in tow, hit the trains and buses, every single morning. Would this network, with trains now running at 2-minute intervals during rush hour, be able to cope? Such a situation will either make our public transport system unbearably inefficient and unsafe, or give our operators more reason to raise fares to cover additional operating costs.

In addition, drivers who give up on congested and ever-more costly highways will find themselves burning more fuel when taking longer, alternative routes – probably cheaper but not much faster, and still spewing pollution. Only this time, the fumes and noise will be closer to our homes, spread out into streets that lack the wide buffer zones of our highways.

Even worse, ERP charges do not just tax personal car owners, once they reach a certain level impossible for businesses to absorb. This will lead to increase in prices for almost anything we buy that spends time on our well-ERPed roads.

There is a lot more that needs to be done in LTA’s attempts to reduce traffic congestion. Chief among them is a need to understand and accept the mentality of drivers. The ERP system is a mathematical solution for a mathematical problem, but people are not robots that react to logical impetus. N