Stupid Traffic Congestion in Singapore

Well the best run country in the world now shows signs of getting all the megajams plauguing all the big cities in Asia. Trip times are multiplied by 3 in the past few years, in spite of the government's efforts to both earn revenue from high tech Electronic Road Pricing techniques with the excuse of improving traffic this way.

Well my main assertion is - people are stupid, and if you place a price on the highways, and people know no alternative route, he's screwed anyway and would have to take the same highway and pay a price. Which is great for the purposes of revenue generation but destroys any excuse for using ERP to control road-use behaviour.

Simple solution though - introduce a system where real time traffic data is streamed to a GPS unit in the car, and the GPS calculates the optimal route. This is not rocket science and is a hell of a lot cheaper than the ERP system for example. It's called RDS/TMC - Traffic Messaging Channel via Radio Data System.

With RDS/TMC it would instruct users where to go to avoid traffic. This will distribute traffic properly, making it possible for us to have tons of cars on the roads and yet move properly.

There's an entire thread discussing RDS/TMC in Singapore, including `why the government won't do it', here: http://forum.carma.com.sg/showthread.php?p=17536783#post17536783

How it works in essence, is this:

Singapore already has a pretty comprehensive traffic monitoring system set up by the LTA, called EMAS. Unfortunately, all it does is to tell you - MASSIVE JAM AHEAD when you're already on the highway. Man, this is priceless.

This traffic data can easily be parsed into TMC format, and distributed via RDS using the existing radio stations, and the in-car GPS receivers will pick up this data, merge it with their calculations and tell you the optimal route to take to avoid traffic and make your destination in the fastest possible time. A Wiki primer on RDS/TMC can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Message_Channel The Wiki primer has model implementations, which I am sure from the variety of models there, the pen pushers at the Land Transport Authority of Singapore would be able to modify to local needs.

There were many cynical questions in the thread regarding - why would the government do it if it didn't make them money? Well, that's part of a bigger problem - THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WE HAVE WITH OUR ROADS WAS THAT IT WAS BUILT BY GOVERNMENT. So everything is not based purely on market, but majorly on the notion of garnering public approval cloaked with the vague notion of the `public good' and calls go unheeded in favour of reports made by a bureaucrat who probably doesn't drive like most do. Now that we have a technology which garners microvotes in real time - RDS/TMC, where people can vote for the best road a million times a minute totally depending on the dynamics of the traffic situation, when the people can finally decide `what's good for them' the government stalls on its implementation while they spend billions on projects of questionable good like the Electronic Road Pricing system, EMAS which is utterly unreservedly useless and Speed Cameras. For the record, my personal experience is that idiots who STAND ON THE BRAKES every time they see the ERP gantry and
a speed camera, are far too common and too frequently cause accidents. I strongly believe if that we had an accident map of Singapore where a red dot signifies an accident, the ERP gantries and speed camera areas would be stained blood red.

TRULY, RDS/TMC is merely a workaround the problem. THE BEST SOLUTION BY FAR, we must PRIVATIZE OUR HIGHWAYS and ROADS. Once we privatize, the prevailing dogma is that the private companies will ensure maximum volume of traffic go through their roads. A competitor who may have less traffic on their roads, then BAM! he will advertise and and the RDS/TMC system will serve to redistribute traffic to his roads. While this does not guarantee FAST TRIPS, it will guarantee optimization to the wishes of the people! After all, people are voting by driving on the roads they choose. Pricing will be real and market based.

Now go to http://forum.carma.com.sg/showthread.php?t=1228740 and place a post and write your suggestions, or you can write a suggestion here and I transfer it over to the thread.