Earlier last month, Foreign Minister Shanmugam told a conference held in Washington that there would be no change to our government's rational approach. Rational approach is good but no change is not, especially if current policies are leading us to and almost assuredly off the clift edge.
Consider our Ministry of Transport under Mr Lui Tuck Yew. He inherited a system that worked quite well for the most part but whose use-by date is almost up if not past due date. The ERP and COE system that basically allowed us to kick the car ownership and CBD traffic flow can for almost a decade or two is almost out of road in both the figurative and literal sense.
And what is the ministry's latest (and continuing) presumably rational policy response to this? The flattening of Bukit Brown to build a four lane highway to ease traffic congestion. Just how many Bukit Brown's are there left to flatten to ease future traffic congestion? Next up: Fort Canning? Mount Faber? Bukit Timah?
And it is not just Bukit Brown. Other green areas have been cleared for roads to ease traffic congestion. Why? An expanding ERP network has pushed drivers to make increasing use of peripheral roads causing these roads to become congested. ERP has not solved the traffic congestion problem, merely transferred it somewhere else.
Does Mr Lui sincerely believe that the latest road building through Bukit Brown will forever solve the traffic congestion problem? No, but yet he still persists in doing so! Einstein was credited with saying that the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing but yet expecting the outcome to be different each time.
Is Mr Lui then insane? Unfortunately not. Mr Lui has no expectation that repeated road expansion will eventually solve our traffic congestion problem. If this were a murder case, Mr Lui could not plead insanity because his action is the result of careful (rational?) thinking and planning. Pre-meditated in other words.
Mr Lui has stated that the rate of vehicle growth moderated by the COE system cannot be zero. He is right. It should be NEGATIVE but again unfortunately, I believe he has some positive number in mind. After all, the government depends on the COE system for a not insignificant portion of its revenue.
So, if Minister of Transport, Mr Lui Tuck Yew is adopting a rational approach to the challenges facing his ministry, we are very ready to hear his plans, hopefully before every bit of land not used for housing is covered over by asphalt and multistory carparks.
Our transportation policies are in need of a drastic overhaul, not the ineffective tweaking that may only be good enough to see Mr Lui through his term as Minister of Transport before being tansferred to another ministry. If that is indeed his goal, then in that context, his actions are indeed rational, but unfortunately only for his personal benefit. What do you think?
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