While urban societies (Singapore included) are lamenting the slowdown in population growth and replacement rate, Jerome shows us one population in Singapore that has been steadily increasing: the population of cars on our roads. How much? At the time of independence, we had about 160,000 car on our roads. 45 years later, we have nearly a million!

This leap in vehicle population has led to the need to better control the flow of traffic, through better road networks and restriction of entry into areas by taxation. Jerome writes:

So, how did we get to where we are today? When the first motor car arrived in 1896, things were slow and easy. Rickshaws would have been the means by which most got about and distances travelled would probably have been small. It took perhaps a quarter of a century or so before the motor vehicle population started taking off: from a population of 535 cars in 1913, the number of cars tripled five years later. By the time I was being rocked to sleep in the back of my father’s Austin 1100 in the mid 1960s, the population of the island had grown tremendously and the number of vehicles on the roads had increased by some one hundred times. It was thought that the vehicle population would hit one million by 1990 based on a Ministry of National Development (MND) forecast, and with the limited land resources available, and the need to redistribute population centres as well as industries to the outer reaches, plans were put forward in the early 1970s to improve the road system and for the construction of a mass transit system. The plans for the improvement in the road system were the catalyst for the expressway network that we see today.

Jerome’s post, From driving around beautiful circles to driving under monstrous gantries, takes us through the history of Singapore’s traffic management systems, which is riddled with familiar and also outdated acronyms: ALS, RZ, ERP, CBD, RPS, VQS, COE, IU… do you know what they all stand for?