On 27 November, Chng Ken-Wei, Centre Director (China) at Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore, recounted Singapore’s traffic issues at the Technology Innovation and Smart City Forum of the Asia Youth Leaders Forum 2021.

The full speech is as below.

Singapore is in fact a very small island country. Our country occupies a territory of only 740 square kilometers, with a population of 5.5 million. The numbers are very small. But if you divide the latter number by the former one, you'll know that the population density of Singapore is around 8,000 people per square kilometer. 

IBM proposed "Smarter Planet" in 2008, while Singapore, in 2006, adopted "Intelligent Nation 2015" as our national ICT blueprint, which was two years earlier than IBM. The development plans of Smarter Planet and Intelligent Nation 2015 basically have the same goals, three very simple goals. The first is how to make our citizens live a comfortable and happy life, which is the most important. The second is how to enable enterprises in Singapore to reach their full potential. The third is how to make governance most efficient. Although our plan has changed a lot since 2006, the goals basically stay the same.

Try to think about how to make people live comfortably on such a small area, where there are 8,000 people on each square kilometer of land. Traffic is a big problem in Singapore. Many people focus on technology for solutions, but technology, in fact, is not the main solution to traffic problems; urban planning is. For example, how to decentralize the functions of the city is a big role of government planning. Singapore has some other famous solutions – or maybe undesirable solutions. The Certificate of Entitlement (COE) is probably the most expensive paper in the world. Last month I checked the COE prices. The highest is about SGD90,000, which amounts to RMB450,000. To make it more specific, do you know how much a basic Tesla Model 3 costs in Singapore? RMB1,000,000. In Singapore, we have different solutions to the problem of car ownership; technology is one of them. We had the first electronic toll collection (ETC) system in the world. Now it's obsolete, so we've been upgrading it to the second generation. Future planning will surely move towards autonomous driving, because this can double the capacity of existing roads. 

However, smart driving or autonomous driving is actually a double-edged sword to a government. In Singapore, we have to consider some social issues that autonomous driving may cause in the future. Here is perhaps the most important one. My mother used to say that I would be a street cleaner if I did not have a good education. When autonomous driving is launched, I can't even clean the road. A robot is doing this for me. And I can't work as a courier because everything is automated. I can't work in a factory as well because everything is done by robots. So how should we solve these problems? On the other hand, all the companies say that they are short of talented people or short of developers. So, a government needs to think about how to balance demands and supplies on both sides. How to ensure, for example, vocational retraining for some drivers to become programmers? We've spent a large sum of money and subsidies on this.

Another pain point, I think, is data security. Everyone is concerned about the massive amount of data collected during fully autonomous driving. How to protect and use this data is a big issue. Besides, in the past, for instance, an insurance investigator could simply figure out who should be responsible for a simple car accident. In the future, however, if there's a car accident, it should be investigated like an air crash. How to analyze the black box and the data inside calls for a brand-new set of capabilities. The problem is that every country, including Singapore, is in the shortage of such talents. It will take a while to groom them. Therefore, how to groom these talents now is a very important subject.