Certificate to own car in Singapore rockets to $106,000 | Hacker News Reader

Certificate to own car in Singapore rockets to $106,000

theguardian.com

41 pointsadrian_mrd30 comments

Singapore is the only country that prices cars appropriately. Every other country simply externalize the cost of a car onto everybody else including other car drivers.

Even if that's true, it allows poor people to own cars, so it's probably a good thing.

Only because public transportation is inadequate. Registration, gasoline, maintenance and insurance are huge burdens.

People, rich OR poor, shouldn't need to babysit a two-ton machine just to live their life.

The fewer people own cars, the better for society and the planet.

That's such an US centric view. In Singapore, public transit is clean and reliable and everyone uses it. There's also no "you are poor" stigma attached to it so when we wanted to get to the afterparty of a startup event, everyone (including the CEOs) just took the MRT together. There's truly no need to own a car. Unless maybe as a status symbol or a collector's item.

Fair point. A car wouldn't be nearly as useful on a small, densely populated island like Singapore as it is in the US.

I was just responding to a comment talking about every country.

> as it is in the US

Which is only the case because the then-nascent car industry worked hard to make it so.

There's no conspiracy theory here. Lobbying to remove city trolley systems; propaganda to establish and spread the idea of jaywalking; funds put toward undermining passenger rail; and so on— it's all well-documented.

These moneyed interests are the reason the US still doesn't have a high speed rail system and likely never will.

Not only (I'd argue not even mostly) because of that.

The US is huge and people want to own land. Suburbs sold because people wanted them.

Car ownership being deceptively cheap forces poor people in places like Texas to spend a large chunk of their meager income on a car so they can continue working, instead of having enough riders to resurrect the bus systems they had in the 1930s-60s, or better yet, motivate intercity trains and suburban rail. My mother was able to take the train from Lubbock to College Station in the early 60s to visit her boyfriend. There's not been a practical way to travel between those cities without a car in my lifetime - Greyhound outside of a few city pairs is very, very theoretical.

I grew up poor in the inner city. No one I knew felt _forced_ to buy a car or wanted to use public transportation rather than own a car. We wanted cars; no one wants a car more than someone who can't afford one.

Later I spent a few months in Europe living without a car to try the lifestyle. Even with adequate buses and intercity trains, I missed having a car.

Now I live in a rural area, the kind of place where it's close to impossible to live without a car.

Owning a car means the freedom to go where you want, when you want, with who and what you want. Even the best public transportation is a poor alternative outside of the densest cities.

(Of course, Singapore is a dense city so this policy makes more sense there.)

Where in Europe (approximately)? Life in rural Bavaria 30km outside of Nürnberg without a car is far more difficult than without one in Nürnberg, within 500m of an U-Bahn station, and Nürnberg isn't that dense.

Non-ownership of a car in the mid-sized Texas city I grew up in basically meant you were unemployable for anything beyond minimum-wage jobs, and even then, employers were apprehensive, because there was a good chance you were going to have trouble getting to work reliably - there, bicycles are children's toys or for spandex-clad enthusiasts to ride on rural roads, not transportation, and the rather minimal bus system is fairly useless for people who don't need to get to the main hospital.

It also takes time to wean from car dependence - it's a mental shift that took me a couple of years to complete, but now that I've made it, it contributes to the reverse culture shock I have when visiting home (central Texas). At this point, I strongly prefer the train for travel to locations in or near the rail network, even if it takes a bit longer, because I find that having to deal with a car limits what I can do. Recreational biking is easier if you can go by train. Not having to stay alert for 3-5 hours (depending on traffic) after a day of skiing means being able to afford to go more often.

Back on topic: when I first found out about Singapore's CoE system and extremely high car sales taxes, I felt awful for them, because I couldn't fathom life without a car. Now, having spent several years as a transit user who shares a car that stays parked most weeks, and having visited Singapore, I completely understand.

Maybe our difference in perspective is due to any restrictions on my car usage after age 16 being by choice (college, moving to a place where the car/transit usage boundary conditions were extremely different from where I grew up).

If the U.S. knew how to build decent public transportation at reasonable costs it wouldn’t be an issue. But of course there’s always corruption. Singapore has extremely low corruption so it’s not an issue there.

Oh yeah? How do you figure?

Singapore literally has no extra space to accomodate cars. Every square meter of car infrastructure is a square meter taken away for anything else. Thus pricing land and infrastructure use appropriately is extremely important.

Beyond a certain number of cars congestion is net negative for everyone. With a bidding process you allocate car ownership to where there is actual economic value.

ok but how does this matter for other countries? The approach works for Singapore, but that says nothing about what is right for other places. Parent comment came across as being generally anti car.

A substantial number of American suburbs cannot pay for and maintain their car-centric infrastructure. The economic cost of requiring cars over public transit has an enormous social cost. The diseconomics of scale from designing cities around cars can also be priced in.

Singapore may be extremely expensive than other places for car ownership but ultimately the prices in infrastructure, pollution and inneficiencies exist everywhere.

These are just assertions without evidence, and every time I see these they inevitably end up being someone’s ideological gripes rather than something based on evidence.

Cars are awesome. Yes, islands are constrained in space so it makes sense that everything including houses would be more expensive.

But not everywhere is Singapore or Hawaii.

The direct cost of cars isn’t that bad but the low density that cars allow requires a lot of extra infrastructure that is very expensive to maintain.

I'm sorry but it seems absolutely self-evident that cars produce pollution in the cost of microplastics, noise pollution, CO2 emissions, burnt oil, etc.

It's self-evident that car accidents have a huge cost in lives.

It's self-evident that requiring people to be of sound mind and senses to have a license to drive because there are literally no affordable alternatives causes impact to minors, elders, and people with disabilities.

No, cars suck. They suck really bad. Living next to an avenue or a highway literally reduces life expectancy. Spending n% of your waking hours commuting having to drive in a medium with a nontrivial chance of an accident versus being in a train or bus or walking is a clear disadvantage to anyone who doesn't absolutely depend on a car to move.

Allocating road infrastucture to a budget is a clear use of funds that could be literally going anywhere else for better use.

I swear some people are just so used to the needless pain of car ownership they can't imagine anything else, and I say this as someone who owns and uses a car.

Nah, the majority of people like and want to be able to go anywhere whenever they want. It’s nice to have nice cities and nice public transport but you don’t need to get rid of cars for that.

Some people have a weird fixation on having everyone live in giant cities with giant buildings with as much density as possible. That would bring its own issues and then you’d end up spending huge resources to try to fix those issues instead of maintaining the road infrastructure that gives people freedom.

Who said gettin rid of cars? We just said pricing their environmental and infrastructure costs appropriately, which is much, much higher than it currently is.

The idea that cars bring freedom just happens because many countries happen to have atrocious public infrastructure. As a car owner in a city having a car is 95% of the time a pain in the ass and justifiably so.

Nah, there is other expensive countries too like Finland. Where taxes on cars were higher than income taxes...

Moreover, Singapore externalize entire rural area to foreign countries.

Beyond the high price to just purchase a car, Singapore freeways are loaded with tolls which make the price to operate vehicles even higher.

The flip side, the roads/infrastructure/landscaping of Singapore are the best I've ever seen. Modern and pristine, at least we know those funds are being put to good use.

_Supposedly_ it's now common for cars to be "stolen on a trip to Thailand" near the COE expiration. (This allows the owner to store the car out of country rather than being forced to sell it in Thailand.)

Is that per year or like a taxi medallion?

What's a taxi medallion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion?wprov=sfti1

it's fine to have a heavy cost to private ownership because they have a decent public transport.

The rising COE prices also impacts the used car market, making vehicles more expensive.

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