Reinventing Transport

This post is to share a presentation on Singapore's Public Transport policies which I gave in Seoul in September. This is my own take on the story, not any kind of official narrative. I took a rather long-term perspective, going back to the 1930s and emphasizing important changes in the 1970s. It is also a 'big picture' view. But some of the current debates are also there. If you have any interest in Singapore's public transport story, then take a peek and let me know what you think. Public Transport Policy in Singapore (a long view) from Paul Barter If you can't see the embedded slideshow above, then try clicking  Public Transport Policy in Singapore (a long view) .    By the way, Singapore has had a busy year of transport and urban planning announcements. Early in the year, there was the controversial Population White Paper . That was followed closely by the Land Use Plan  (basically the latest Concept Plan, Singapore's strategic plan that c...

This diagram is from a new presentation (see below) in which I make the following claims: "New Transit Cities" are especially relevant for newly motorizing cities (such as India’s cities) Cities that are now New Transit Cities were, in the past, faced with challenging circumstances similar to those facing India’s cities today (namely a flood of vehicles causing traffic saturation at a time when they lacked significant mass transit that was immune from traffic) After flirting with accommodating cars, the New Transit Cities all resisted the idea that cars are a necessity and acted to make sure cars remained optional.  Please take a look and tell me what you think in the comments. Let me know about any corrections or omissions. Do you agree? If you can't see the embedded SlideShare version below, then download the presentation from the CSE India website  (7MB pdf). Look to the new transit metropolises from Paul Barter By the way, I presented this ...

Don't be too starry eyed about Singapore's urban transport policies.  Yes, they do offer plenty for others to emulate. But there are also problems and cautionary tales.  In a recent book chapter I look at some of the problems with the current approach and speculate about a different overall strategy for Singapore urban transport policy. High-speed one-way traffic in Singapore's new CBD.  I have been here more than 12 years now and during that time I have been watching Singapore urban transport policy and practice pretty closely, as part of my research and as a user. I think I am well placed to offer a balanced perspective. The chapter is called ‘Singapore’s Mobility Model: Time for an Update?’ and is published in the Institute for Mobility Research's 2013 book, Megacity Mobility Culture: How Cities Move on in a Diverse World , (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer). To give you a sense of my argument, here is the conclusion of the chapter: Singapore is a us...

For the last year or two, most of my work (and blogging) has focused on parking (see the  Reinventing Parking blog  or on facebook ). But now I also want to revive this neglected blog and to use it to stay mindful of what really motivates my work (including the parking work). So what exactly is it that motivates my transport policy work? The statement below is an attempt to capture what I am trying to achieve as clearly as I can. A  mission statement  for my professional life, if you like. Yikes. You will see signs of these motivations throughout this blog, its predecessor , in my tweeting  and in much of my professional writing .  I aim to help cities, towns and streets unleash greater success, equity and conviviality  by focusing more on transport's 'ends' (such as  placemaking , accessibility and mobility ) than its ' means ' (such as  vehicles and traffic ) and  by enhancing choice  and choice-making i...

Update:   I appeared on a panel discussion of this topic on the Talking Point program on Channel News Asia TV. The full video can be viewed HERE (for a few months I think). It is the 21 - 03 - 2012 episode . Singapore's Budget 2012 announced a large funding injection into the bus system. This has caused   much   debate . I felt the need to write something to explain that I see a wider importance in the announcement. The initial Government explanations have focused on the need to improve bus services while we wait for the MRT system to grow further.  But I think the funds should be used strategically to enable two important reforms. In fact, I suspect that this may be the intention, although it has not yet been clearly explained. So, with some trepidation (it has become a hot political issue since I started writing it), I submitted an Op Ed to the Straits Times. It appeared in the ST Review section on Thursday 1 March.  Subscribers to the Straits Ti...

Dave Brook's Carsharing.US blog has two recent posts that take stock of the continued rise of carsharing. The first is a review of carsharing in 2011 and the latest looks at predictions for 2012 . Both have an international perspective and are good reads for anyone with an interest in the reinvention of urban transport services. A few highlights from Dave's assessment of carsharing in 2011:  Are we seeing a demographic tipping point? — This was the year when the mainstream marketers admitted that many in Gen Y ("the Millennials") weren't thinking about cars the same way their parents were - they'd rather have their iPhone than a car. ... Parking is fundamental - Parking is a fundamental but often under appreciated aspect of car use. It wasn't until Donald Shoup layed the cards on the table in his landmark "The High Cost of Free Parking" that most of us realized just how fundamental parking really is. And carsharing operators also know ho...

Here is another example of Combined Mobility and a big step towards realising the idea of ' mobility brokers '. This one is from Germany and it is called "mo " . It is being tested and piloted in Munich and features some beautiful design and fascinating innovations to make car-lite living very convenient. mo is a new mobility system - it helps make the city a better place to live. mo subscribers can rent bikes, cargobikes, ebikes and cars or use public transportation with just one card. With mo it pays to be eco-friendly: choose an eco-friendly transport or use your own bike to collect mo miles. The more mo miles the lower your bill. For instance if you mostly ride bikes, renting a car gets cheaper. These two videos explain much better than I could. Introducing mo from LUNAR Europe on Vimeo . mo - mobility for tomorrow from LUNAR Europe on Vimeo . For more details, check out this October 2011 press release about mo . Hat tip:  Treehugger.

When I wrote my last post "From Carsharing to Mobility Brokers" I didn't realise that the UITP was about to release a position paper on the issue. UITP is the International Association of Public Transport. I was alerted to UITP's work on this by the cover story of New Transit magazine (7 July 2011 issue) from the UK: " Time to forget modes... the future is in the Mobility Mix ". The article is well worth reading. It is subscription only but there is a free preview offer that allows a peek: Today’s customers have a new attitude to their travel choices. Offering “combined-mobility” across the modes can persuade people away from the private car. So what are the ingredients in this new mix, and who should take the lead on serving them up? I am particularly interested in that last question! The UITP report is by its Combined Mobility Platform . The English language version is here as a pdf . Various language versions are available .  UITP is urging its me...

I am excited by the prospect of urban 'mobility retailers' or 'mobility brokers'.  'Huh'? What is that, you ask? A mobility broker is a business that handles the retailing, marketing and information end of your mobility needs. It may not even own any vehicles or employ any drivers (and you won't have to either). You could think of it as an urban transport travel agent. Such services would probably be most attractive for people who choose not have a car of their own. Because urban mobility is much more spontaneous and immediate than long-distance travel, mobility brokers will need to handle requests extremely nimbly in real time. Most cities don't yet have such beasts in their urban transport landscape. Not yet. But I think they will emerge out the innovative and vibrant ecosystem of handheld devices, real-time information apps, social media and networking, car-sharing companies, new payment systems, telematics, location-based services, etc.  I t...

Despite its age (I finished it in 1999), I still get requests now and then for my PhD thesis. The old link to download it broke some time ago but last week the Murdoch University Research Repository came to the rescue and put it back up. So you can again  download it as a pdf via this page . Please forgive the shameless self promotion here! I never turned my thesis into a book, as many academics do. Instead I simply made it available on the web. A bad move? I did have some doubts when I saw bits of it plagiarized once or twice. But it also has 61 citations according to Google Scholar. I guess that's not too bad for an unpublished thesis. Last year, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) picked up some of its ideas for their document,  Changing Course: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Urban Transport  [ PDF ]. The full title of my PhD dissertation is:   An international comparative perspective on urban transport and urban form in Pacific Asia: the challenge of...

The newly resurrected Transport Blog has an interesting riff on taxis  around the world. The post is an entertaining read, full of pithy observations (and quite a lot of speculation I suspect). Yet it cleverly sneaks in some important points on the dry dry topic of taxi regulation. Which is great because improving taxi industry arrangements is an important but sadly neglected element of urban transport policy. Hanoi's taxis feature prominently - hence the intriguing title " How to spook a Vietnamese taxi driver ". You have to read to the end to understand the reference. There are brief comments on taxi service and its regulation all over the world. If author Michael Jennings is to be believed, taxis in Bulgaria and Buenos Aires are to be avoided if humanly possible. Hanoi taxis in their natural habitat (a sea of motorcycles!) Singapore's get a little nod too. Which reminds me that a few years ago I wrote something about Singapore's taxi arrangements . Si...

Shared-space design for streets and intersections deliberately creates a sense of uncertainty about who should proceed first. Such uncertainty is not a bug, it is a feature, as they say. In a well designed scheme, the results are said to be almost magical. The removal of clear-cut rules and signs and traffic lights prompts caution, low speeds and a negotiated approach to right-of-way instead of a rules-based approach. But there may be a problem.  Some of the most vulnerable users of streets don't seem to like shared space. It makes them feel ... vulnerable . In a comment on my post on Shared Space designs in Japan, David Hembrow (author of   a view from the cycle path blog) points out the Dutch cycling advocacy groups are not too keen on Shared Space: "Don't get too excited about Shared Space. I've yet to meet anyone here in the Netherlands who is enthusiastic about it. In fact, there is much criticism of it due to it having lead to a reduction in safety, ...

'Who should be liable in road crashes involving bicycles?'. That's the question I posed over at Cycling in Singapore blog this morning. In many low-income or middle-income countries the road culture norms dictate that 'might makes right'. Small vehicles learn to get out of the way of the larger ones and the largest vehicles tend to barge their way through (more carefully perhaps than it seems at first glance... but they do seem to expect others to make way). However, in several European countries and in Japan, large road users are expected to exercise a strong duty of care for the more vulnerable ones.  So in the Netherlands for example, it will almost always be the motorist who is held primarily responsible in a crash with a bicyclist, even if the motorists broke no road rules. Does that seem crazy to you? Bicycles and scooters in Shanghai. It probably does seem strange if you live in the UK, the US or in almost any Commonwealth country, such as Singap...

"Parking" is currently the most common tag on this site and much of my research now focuses on parking. So it seemed time to consider starting a blog to focus specifically on parking policy. So that is exactly what I have now done. It is called Reinventing Parking . Among other things, I want to try to help communities understand the parking choices they face and to help them to improve their policies. If you agree with me that parking policy is important please visit Reinventing Parking and consider subscribing to its feed or via email.  Please spread the word to people who care about improving parking policy anywhere in the world.

Here is an entertaining video explanation and exhortation on Pay-As-You-Drive (PAYD) insurance. Does your country, state or province have PAYD insurance yet? It was made by Cliff Caprani of British Columbia, Canada. See more context at the original site where there is a link to a petition for residents of BC. Hat tip: VTPI Newsletter, Summer 2010, by Todd Litman, one of the key experts on PAYD Insurance .

Freely flowing traffic is a good thing, right? And affordable motoring is good too, isn't it? Most motorists in most cities would surely agree. Maybe you would too? But as citizens and voters I think we need to be careful what we wish for. When political leaders decide that the central goals of urban transport policy are 1) solving traffic congestion and 2) keeping driving affordable, they may make themselves popular with motorists, but they also risk gradually turning their city into a monster.  I argued along these lines in a talk I gave on Wednesday to a couple of hundred junior college (high school) students (the presentation is at the end of this post). It was a non-technical talk on basic priorities in urban transport planning. Below is part of my reasoning. The Los Angeles region is not the world's most automobile-dependent city but it is the only mega-city to try so hard to keep driving fast and cheap. When faced with traffic problems it is tempting to ju...

Can you help me make this analogy more useful? A household owning a car is like a tiny business hiring a jack-of-all-trades (but master of none ...). Your mobility needs during the course of a whole year can be likened to the skills and labour needs of a new business contemplating its first employee. Having a car gives you a tool that handles most of your mobility needs. It is like hiring a full-time staffer who is a 'jack-of-all trades'. He or she is versatile but not especially skilled or quick at any particular task. There are significant fixed costs too. You have to pay him or her about the same in both busy times and slow periods. In both cases there is an alternative.  A family can refrain from getting a car and rely instead on the various alternatives. That's like the small business putting off that first full-time employee and deciding instead to engage a series of contractors to do tasks that the owner-founder can no longer handle, as and when they ar...

After decades of mostly ignoring bicycles, Singapore's authorities have recently become more positive. "Bicycle paths" are appearing but we may need more help to get them right. An example in Sembawang. A painted line separates pedestrians from bicycle users. The change in attitude is very welcome. But some of us here are worried about the designs of these paths. The photo below illustrates one problem. 'Dismount and push' sign where the bicycle path meets the entrance to a parking area in the housing estate. My recent post at Cycling in Singapore looks at the bike paths in one such town (Sembawang). Be aware that most bicycle use in Singapore is at very low speed, is for short trips, and takes place on the footways, which are usually much narrower than the paths shown here. Conflict between bicycles and pedestrians is an emotive issue often raised in newspaper letters and online forums. Riding on sidewalks/footpaths is illegal but ubiquitous. The...

The shared space (or 'naked streets') approach to street design was developed in the Netherlands right? The late Hans Monderman was the pioneering hero who extended it to some surprisingly busy roads and intersections, correct? And it has been popularised and applied in the UK and elsewhere by Ben Hamilton-Baillie , hasn't it? Or did shared space emerge in Japan? In a recent Ecohearth post explaining the shared space idea , Dawn Marshallsay includes this sentence: It could be said that Tokyo led the way, as most of its roads follow the shared-space principle, although they were not purposefully designed to reduce accidents. Actually, it is mainly small side-streets that are like that, not most roads, but you get the point. Here are some examples photographed during my short visits to Japan. (Scroll down for more discussion after the pictures) Near Fukuoka airport and a subway station. Near Tokyo University and Ueno in central Tokyo. In Nishitokyo City, ...

In this segment I try to connect you with recent items relevant to reinventing urban transport.  From a public domain image at Wikimedia commons Robin Chase suggests a cap-and-trade approach to residential parking permits. An idea with potential I think. Charting Transport provides fascinating graphical analysis of journey-to-work mode shares in Melbourne. Cycling in Singapore blog highlights fruits of the slow shift towards more positive bicycle policy in Singapore (bike paths aimed at local, low-speed bicycle users but I worry about their quality and design). Human Transit marvels at the new Paris commitment to giving buses priority and space in the streets, even narrow ones. New York Times reports on the Guangzhou BRT. Great quotes from ITDP folks. The BRT was reported to have set a new BRT record of 800,000 trips a day. Hat tips Streetsblog and Transport News . Tokyo by Bike discusses confusion over Japan's bicycle laws. Twice . Copenhagenize warns of the dang...

What competition do cars have in your city? I don't mean competition between Toyota, Ford or Hyundai. I don't even mean competition between cars and public transport for this morning's work trips. I am talking about competition between a car-owning lifestyle and a set of alternatives that add up to a whole lifestyle, creating a complete 'mobility package' attractive enough to make car ownership feel optional. In places like Manhattan or Hong Kong or the inner cities of Zurich, Paris, Tokyo or London a lifestyle without your own car is already an attractive option even for wealthy people.   But could we extend the range of places where not having a car is an excellent lifestyle choice? Can we make car use more provisional and less locked-in to our liefstyles and our urban systems? How? Here is a presentation I gave last year which tackles some of these issues in a non-technical way. Under-appreciated and neglected urban transport policy opportunities (and ref...

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?   Try Reinventing Parking. ] Here is a presentation with highlights from the Asian Cities Parking Study that I have mentioned before . I gave this at the ADB Transport Forum in Manila in late May 2010. Barter for ADB Transport Forum 2010 What do you think? Post a comment. You may feel that the policy implications near the end don't necessarily follow obviously from the data in the earlier slides. And you would be right. Some of them are a little speculative. They are based on the wider findings, on the data in the study, on my wider research on parking, and on arguments advanced in the study report itself (out soon I hope).   A parking meter in Guangzhou. It serves two spaces and accepts only contactless card payment.