No additional new cars for Singapore

Roads account for 12 per cent of Singapore’s total land area and the 278 square mile island city-state is home to some 907,000 vehicles, including approximately 612,000 cars. Enough is enough, says the Land Transport Authority of Singapore (LTA) – from February 2018, it will allow no additional growth in the country’s car and motorcycle parc.

This means the only way to get a new car on the road in Singapore will be through the de-registration of an old one. In order to purchase a new car, Singaporeans require a Certificate of Entitlement (COE), which is valid for ten years. The number of COEs issued is primarily determined by how many old vehicles were de-registered in preceding months, but this figure is currently supplemented by a provision for vehicle growth – until the end of January 2018, this figure is 0.25 per cent of Singapore’s car parc (as of 31 December 2016) per annum, an amount that has allowed an additional 576 vehicles to join Singapore’s vehicle population each quarter. As of Thursday, the provision for vehicle growth will be effectively removed for the coming two years.

“In view of Singapore’s land constraints and our commitment to continually improve our public transport system, we will lower the vehicle growth rate from the current 0.25 per cent per annum to 0 per cent with effect from February 2018 for COE Categories A (smaller cars), B (larger cars) and D (motorcycles),” shares the LTA in a statement. “The existing vehicle growth rate of 0.25 per cent per annum for Category C (goods vehicles and buses) will remain unchanged until 1Q 2021, to provide businesses more time to improve the efficiency of their logistics operations and reduce the number of commercial vehicles that they require.”

Singapore’s LTA believes its decision to stop growth of the country’s vehicle fleet won’t “significantly affect the supply of COEs” over the next couple of years, and it says it will again review the vehicle parc growth rate in 2020.