GMS visited URA Centre.
16 June at 23:47 ·
I visited URA Center to participate in the guided tour of the Space for Our Dreams exhibition today with my family.
At the end of the Exhibition, I asked the manager or person in charge of the exhibition what parameters such as population size were set for this 50 years Concept Plan. I was actually shocked and disappointed that she said no parameter was set as they wanted to be "flexible" and "nothing is concrete". They no longer do city concept planning using parameters....etc.
Seriously, this is the first time I am told city concept planning without parameters set. There is an exhibit of the winning plan of how PLAB (Paya Lebar Airport) will look like but I didn't find the key parameter of how many residents does the plan cater for.
The whole exhibition has grand sounding concepts but I seriously doubt how some of the different concepts could jell together without a proper set of parameters determined.
For example, it was said that 12% of land has been used as road while 14% used for residential. They are aiming at "car lite" city with majority of people using public transport.
However, without a projection of population size, how could we really plan for car lite and squeezing everyone into public transport?
Autonomous vehicles are actively promoted but such vehicles still use roads to travel and most importantly, for safety reasons, the speed might be curbed. We may end up with more slow moving traffic in the end.
The massive MRT lines we have and building, are impressive but expensive. Without a projection of population size, we won't know how packed these MRT trains would be if all forced to give up cars.
The problem with public transport is that we will have limitations on population size else, we will have frequent breakdowns apart from over packed sardine trains.
The key problem of public transport is always the last mile transportation after taking the train. The feeder bus service may not be efficient or even effective in some parts of Singapore.
PMD might have solved that problem but it was banned, without proper infrastructure installed. Even bicycle sharing system failed.
The only way to solve this transportation problem is to use technology or decentralize planning.
They have already been doing that building regional business centers like Tampines, Woodlands etc but how successful is that? It only shifted the jams to the regional centers
Work from home has taken a quick revolution for some industry but there are challenges. New HDB flats and condos are just too small to be conducive for WFH.
Unless we could revamp our road network to provide dedicated lanes for PMD like what they did for scooters, electric motorbikes and bicycles in Taiwan or China, while building enough infrastructure for parking them at main MRT stations, we will compromise efficiency and it will not be attractive for going car lite.
In 50 years time frame, I believe Drone Vehicles could become the norm and it will be total liberation from road congestions.
While URA talks about wind corridors and reducing urban heating, it didn't pay attention on how to minimize heat entrapment or building facing to minimize the use of air-conditioning.
Singapore basically faces 2 monsoon seasons, Northeast and Southwest monsoons. Building facing (windows) should avoid West. Highrise building should avoid blocking winds from these two directions when the cluster of buildings or flats are built too densely.
There are just too many things in my mind after going through this exhibition.
I just feel that a lot of the concepts are just paper talk. Some of them have been implemented while others are just doubtful of possibility of implementation.