Better than Beijing, though, from what I hear!

Then at the end of the elevated walkway there’s the Alexandra Arch.  This is a leaf-shaped bridge over Alexandra Road, which is accessible on either end of the bridge.  If you head north on Alexandra, you hit a hospital, Ikea, the BMW and Porsche dealerships, and the Queenstown MRT.  Everything is very accessible and concentrated, and it’s nice that the city planners tried to inject some natural and architectural beauty into the heart of the city as well.

One thing you may have noticed about these postings is that I get a lot of my information about Singapore from cab drivers.  No, I am not made of money, that I take cabs around all the time.  We live in the far west of the island and don’t have a car, but it doesn’t follow that I need cabs all the time.  I hop onto the bus, and then onto the MRT, and am whisked magically almost anywhere.  If I am loaded down with groceries or am in a remote spot far from bus stops and train stations, then I call a cab.  Cabs are pretty cheap; you can get all the way to the airport for about $30.

To catch a bus or train it’s easiest if you have an EZLink card.  These are pre-loaded with money through special machines in the MRT stations; you use your ATM card, tell the machine how much value you want transferred onto your EZLink card, and put in your PIN.  You should have a minimum of $3.00 on the card to ride. This ensures that you can go from the far west all the way to the airport by MRT without depleting your card.  (Yes, it’s about 10% of the cost of a cab to do that, but it’s also an hour slower.)  The EZLink card works on buses and trains and is read by radio-frequency readers when you board and when you disembark the buses, or when you enter and exit the train stations.  No messing about with exact change or subway tokens – it’s quick and easy.

The buses are air conditioned and often equipped with TVs that broadcast shows about food and education – sometimes public service announcements and whatever the cause of the week may be: avoiding gambling, second chances for convicts who’ve served their sentences, recycling, preventing the breeding of mosquitoes.  And funny home videos.  Many buses are double deckers, and it’s really fun to ride on the top through the university campus, because there are so many tall old trees with epiphytic growths clogging their branches, hanging over the road. It’s like jungle trekking 15 feet above the ground, in air conditioned comfort with no mosquitoes.

The only thing that can impede your view up there is the advertising meshes that many buses sport.  Singapore’s buses are mainly a purple and orange combination of colors, except for the SMRT lines that are red and white; but all of them can wear plastic mesh skins that cover the windows and tell people to buy beer (Tiger), cameras, soap, or to go to new interesting places – the Bird Park or a new mall.  There are two buses I’ve seen around I think of as the Dengue Buses.  They sport black meshes with giant photos of mosquitoes, syringes, suffering children or grandparents surrounded by exhausted families, and medical bills.  Public service announcements on wheels.

Your EZLink card doesn’t work on cabs, although most of them take credit cards or ATM cards.  There’s a central number to call to get a cab; the computer at the far end tracks your phone number and the two most recent spots you called from for a pickup.  If you are at one of those spots, you press a button, and if not you speak to an operator.  Then the computer searches for a free cab in your area and you hear a message telling you the license number of your cab and how long it will take to get to you.  Try not to take someone else’s cab, or a free cab you just happen to see while waiting for your assigned one.  If you do, you mess up the queue, although you can easily call the cab phone number and cancel your request or tell the operator you took someone else’s.

Cabs and private cars pay to enter the central business district.  During peak hours this is $8.00, and the cost is passed on to the passenger.  There are various extra fees built into each cab meter, for pickups, for rides during rush hour, petrol charges for long hauls, waiting fees if you’re stuck in traffic or ask the cab to idle while you do an errand.  The meter adds these to the amount due.  There are no unmetered cabs, unless you need a maxicab to hold your luggage on your way to or from the airport, and maxicabs always charge a fixed rate.

Sunday mornings are the cheapest time to travel.  There’s no rush hour fee, and there’s no downtown entrance charge either!

Pretty easy, right?  And I think I mentioned that it’s cheap.  Way cheaper than the cost of buying and maintaining a car, which start at $75,000 and have an annual registration cost of $1200.  Not to mention the downtown entry fee and parking charges, and the fact that cars over ten years old must be gotten rid of!

Which leads me to reveal something I learned about Singapore’s property tax system:

If you own property (which in the vast majority of cases is an apartment or condo), tax on your property is 4% of its annual rental value.  It doesn’t matter how much you paid for it, or how much your neighbors paid for theirs; what matters is the amount you can rent it for.  Easy for government assessors to find out this value.  How would your property taxes do under this regime?  Ours would decrease/

Sales tax:  Singapore has a universal Goods and Services Tax (GST) of 7%.  Compares favorably with California’s, which is now at 9.25%, and with New Zealand’s, which is 12%.  The amount of the GST is almost always included in the marked price on an item, so there are no surprises at the check out counter.

Income tax: Varies from 15-28%.  You can claim deductions for your children, stay-at-home homemaker, parents, and maids.  (See my other posts for the expenses involved in hiring a maid.)

Cars: Ah, now that California’s finally increased its annual license fees for cars (the issue that brought down the fiscally responsible Gray Davis in 2004), I can reveal that driving is NOT CHEAP in Singapore.  A Honda Civic Hybrid, which may cost about $30K in the USA, is $85K (Sing dollars) or about US$57K.  I believe that may include the GST, but don’t quote me on that. Lots of parking fees, gas taxes, and a hefty charge every time you take a vehicle into the Central Business District.*  And an annual license fee of about $1200.  Add to this the law that requires that rolling stock in Singapore be up-to-date – nobody may drive a car over 10 years old.  Old cars are junked or sold overseas (to Malaysia, most conveniently, but possibly New Zealand as well).  Thus the government of Singapore encourages people to take public transit.  Which is quite fine.

What does the country DO with all this revenue?  Good schools, fine roads, good public transit, an army and air force, quite impressive library system, and a trillion-dollar reserve that they can draw upon in difficult economic times (see my previous post on this).

*Singapore was the first country to create this tax on congestion, followed by London.  All routes downtown have gantries over them, containing electronic billing devices that read your car’s code (the law requires you to purchase and install a transponder on your dashboard) and deduct the amount from your bank account.  The amount varies by time of day, and I think it’s about $8 from 7:30-4:30 p.m., less at other times, but never free.  Google “Singapore ERP charges” if you want the real numbers.

How are you?  OK.  I’m a little depressed.

No, I’m just a little sad.  No reason.  I just woke up that way.

Yes, I’ll call you.

In about two and a half hours, I’ll call you.

I’ll call you in two and a half hours.

No, don’t wait; I said I’ll call you, so I’ll call you.

OK, maybe, but that was before.

I said I’ll call you and I’ll call you.  Trust me.

That was then; I’m a changed person now.

I’ll call you.

No, there’s no girl.

What the hell do you know about it?  I said there’s no girl.

I’ll be back in an hour.

Because I have to give him the key; then I’ll come back and open it.

He needs the key so he can see if he wants to do something there.  It’s not a big deal.

I’ll be back in an hour.  Don’t worry about it.

Etc.

This went on for a while longer, with many repetitions, at full volume, although I’m not sure everyone on the train car could hear it as well as I could – the man was practically speaking into my ear, after all.  Once he hung up he turned to his (male) friend on the other side and had another conversation.  My ears were flapping by now, as I wanted to know who it was he had been trying so very hard to reassure: a wife? parent? boss?  But the conversation was in Tamil or Hindi, so I am not destined to know.

But of course, I have filled in the blanks on my own.  So what do you think he was up to?

When the government created the MRT, the wonderful fully automated train system that moves people about cheaply and quickly, they put sensors in the doors to avoid crushing people.  You experience these same sensors when you dash into an elevator and the doors refrain from smashing you flat.  Well, kids being kids, Singaporean youths thought it was funny to put gum over these sensors and watch the results.  The results were slow trains, dangerous doors, bad service, so the government promptly solved the problem by banning gum.  It worked.

Do Singaporean kids miss gum?  I don’t know.  But foreign kids do.  When my daughter’s class, which contains kids from Korea, the U.S., U.K., Japan, Indonesia and other countries, went on a trip to Malaysia, the bus stopped at the immigration kiosk for the kids to get their passports stamped.  Then it stopped at a snack shop, about four inches over the Malaysian border.  The children were disinclined to get off the bus at that point, eager as they were to get to their magical rainforest destination, until a whispered rumor spread that the shop would actually have gum for sale.  Word of this possibility ricocheted throughout the bus and created a stampede of kids, hurtling through the door to fall upon the supply of forbidden delights.  Some spent all their pocket money on boxes and gobs of gum and stuffed their cheeks with it, masticating, popping, snapping and blowing their way through the remainder of the field trip.

They had to use it all in Malaysia, though.  On their way back through customs into Singapore those who still had gum had to yield it to the inspectors.  The trains here still work, and the right of commuters to get around trumps the right of youth to chomp gum.