Sustainable Urban Transport in Singapore: A Balanced Scorecard

Abstract

Singapore is a city state nation with a small area of about 710 square kilometres yet a dense population of 5 million with higher economic growth and denser commercial activities. This Asian tiger nation is often recognized for its very high yet smartly maintained huge and smooth traffic flow on its urban streets. While the success and achievements of Singapore land transport case can be a role-model to follow for other cities there are still challenging areas in its urban transport without a proper address of which may hinder betterment of its sustainability in the long run. Therefore while on the one hand it is necessary to record the successful aspects and learn their root underlying factors it is also essential, on the other hand, to identify the major critical and challenging areas which may stand against its long term sustainability. In order to address these two key issues it is necessary to make a holistic evaluation of the sustainability performance of Singapore’s urban transport. In the past, studies mainly focused on certain aspects while others remained ignored resulting in the lack of a balanced evaluation for urban transport of this city state. The aim of this study is to evaluate the sustainability of Singapore’s urban land transport in the framework of a Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard reviews Singapore’s land transport system with a holistic framework of sustainability. Results show that the efficient institutional structure, deployment of advanced technologies, a world class land transport infrastructure system, good level of air quality, innovative approaches towards problems and strict control over private vehicles are key areas of excellent performance whereas moderate performing areas include mainly energy consumption, global carbon emission and public participation. In addition to these, major good performing areas where further improvements are still needed include service level of public transport, especially buses, congestion management, facilitation of non-motorized transport and car sharing and promotion of green vehicles.

Keywords: Balanced Scorecard, Singapore, Sustainability, Sustainable Development, Urban Transport