The Moley Prophet

When I say real petrol heads, I do not mean anyone out there who drives their flashy Lamborghinis or Mercedes-Benz, or even Porsche Boxster. Neither do I agree with the flashers in their STi or Evos. These people who know nuts about cars, nuts about the beauty of the engineering, nuts about being a good and humble driver, are out of my plan. Although speed is not the No.1 road killer, they are. They go on clubbing sessions, binge drinking when they do not show appreciation to the alcohol they consume, drive recklessly home and then do some spinning and clog up the road or cause accidents by knocking in the car next to them, and while it happens, the vehicles coming from the back, not having the ceramic disc brakes fail to stop in time and crash into the accident cars blocking the way. These are the people who should be, together with the slow movers, buses, and taxis, weeded out of the roads.

As the public transport system goes underneath, the current roads need lots of changes to them as well. Bus lanes are no longer needed, roads should all be tarred again to be even. Cables should run beside the roads to prevent digging up of roads again. Drains should run even deeper, under the new transport system. If possible, every neighborhood should have a large water tank where the drains on higher grounds lead to. A self automated filtering system which will provide water supply for car washing, plant watering and road cleaning which is needed to keep pollution levels low.

You see, it is not impossible to keep the city green and free of gridlocks. It is whether, the ministers are willing to do it. Money is no issue in the ministries if the ministers are really there to serve the country and sacrifice their enormously high pay matching their counterparts all over the world and give our future generation, a better city to live in.

The utopia of motorways would be of course, free of traffic congestions. Speed is not the No.1 road killer. Road blockage is. Imagine, if you drive a Lambo down a road. There were no speed humps, no road dividers, best of all, no road hoggers and speed cameras. Would you be killed? No. The Top Gear team has done it countless of times on their race track.

What could we do to free up congested roads? Well, firstly, we have to remove the slowest vehicles. The main probability why traffic gets screwed up on the road is due to slow moving vehicles. It is a chain reaction. Car "A" slows down, Car "B" which is behind "A" slows down, Car "C" fed up with the slowness, tries to change lane, which it did after slowing down. Car "F" which is on the lane Car "C" is changing to, has to slow down for "C" to inch out, and whoever who is behind "F" may switch lanes and cause all 3 lanes on a 3 lane carriageway to all slow down. And when it happens, there would be many cars trying to switch lanes, and gridlock would happen.

Ever wondered why whenever you reach a point on the road, it gets freed up? This is probably the cause. Therefore, we should weed out such drivers and put them on public transport. However, public transport has also caused huge problems. The government is now talking about the removal of bus bays, which will, cause traffic to become even slower, as buses stop now and then at bus stops. Wondered why they have to let public transport go faster than cars, when car drivers pay the biggest lump of road tax. Taxis are meddlesome too, and its very costly to put the weeds into them.

To solve this, the Transport Ministry with the largest coffers in the world - by percentage in size, should build the world's largest underground transport system for public transport. Taxis are out of this system as they would all be eliminated under this scheme. You would think, what would they work as then? To manage this system, I guess, the workforce required should be huge. So, that is where they should work.

The Singapore Utopia Transport System (SUTs) would be, more effective than any country in the world, be it Japan or Hong Kong. By utilizing the existing MRTs, and using high speed Magnetic Gliding Carriages (MGC), it would ferry commuters from the most convenient pickup location to the train station in a matter of a minute or more. To provide faster and more comfortable ride to commuters, current MRT should be upgraded to MAGLEV trains. This effectively brings travel time between stations down to a matter of seconds. Which effectively increases cycle time as trains would be able to ply the roads again and again in lesser time. As commuters experience less waiting time, and less crammed trains, they would feel the indifference between using cars and not. Which effectively attracts the slow movers out, leaving the roads for real petrol heads and people who really need cars.

To be continued…