A funny remark

Well well, time flies! The Chinese New Year is here and gone, well almost. It's already into the second month of February.

Recently, I saw on the newspaper an article about the ERP charges entering the heartlands, and the transport minister was quizzed by another MP for the reason. Among one of his replies, he said that Singaporean drivers travel quite a lot compared to their counterparts in other big cities. He said that Singaporean drivers clock 21,000 km per year compared to L.A. (19,000+km) and Tokyo (15,000+km).

Well, Excuse me, but first of all, where did he get this statistic from?? What's the backing?
And if that's the case, that means on average, a driver will drive about the entire length of the PIE EVERYDAY FOR 500DAYS! And there ain't even 500days in a year! so everybody stays in jurong work in changi airport? or vice versa?

C'mon, most cars don't even travel that much, and Singapore ain't that big a country. Are you adding the distance covered by taxis? Well that shouldn't count since those are public transport. Hmm and I definitely think that Americans travel mmuch more than Singaporeans due to the distance between places in the BIG land of yankees. So I can't understand.

And he said the govt ain't trying to make money from ERP charges, but then the gantries continue to increase, and they remove road taxes (obviously you need to make money from somewhere else to cover the loss of road taxes). If you do a check, you can see how much they actually make from the ERP in a year. And most people actually believe that the number of cars are not actually going to decrease even with increased ERP charges, but they still increase the charges anyway.

This minister really needs to remove the blindfold from his eyes, go take a ride around the country on public transport and see how it works. I really can't see how he can go about talking so much about this and that without really coming down to the ground from his hot air balloon way up in the sky.

If there are angel and devils, then the angel would come in the form of the finance minister with his $1.8bn goodies for the people. It's really a good welcome for the bonuses and stuff that we're going to get after a bonanza year last year! Although I thought more could be distributed since the govt surplus was $6.45bn last year. But nonetheless, it still is a good thing for everyone.