By Christopher Tan
Senior Correspondent

AS THE wait for improvements to the Park and Ride Scheme continues, car owners who support the anti-congestion plan are having to put up with bottlenecks of their own.

Seletar Hills resident G. Anirudhan, 71, has been using the scheme for several years now. He wakes up early on the 15th of every month to wait in line at Ang Mo Kio MRT station to buy a S$70 set that allows him free daytime parking outside the city and S$40 worth of travel value in a transit card.

"The queue starts from 7.30am," the insurance executive said. "Usually, I have to wait in line for an hour. Sometimes, over an hour.

"Why can't they open more counters?"

Under the 19-year-old scheme, motorists park their cars at a carpark on their route to work, and then catch a bus or train the rest of the way.

About 4,000 Park and Ride sets are available each month, with parking spaces spread across 36 carparks. But only about a third of these spaces are taken up, and demand is not uniform.

A review of the scheme was said to be under way in August last year. Thirteen months on and the Land Transport Authority said "the study is ongoing and details will be made known as soon as they are ready".

Checks by The Straits Times indicate that demand is high among car owners living in the north, largely because of the congested Central Expressway and drivers having to pass through three Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantries to get to town.

On Tuesday, a queue had already formed at the Park and Ride counter in Ang Mo Kio by 7.30am.

Civil servant Siti Aigah, 25, was among those in the slow-moving line. The Yishun resident said: "If I'm just a little late, there will be no more tickets."

Mr Derrick Lim, 36, who is in the IT sector, said: "If it is a queue system, then we should limit it to one set per person. I've seen people buying for others, and even sending their maids down to queue."

Most users are clamouring for a better system. Among the suggestions are more service counters, an electronic system that does away with physical queues, and an option for users to buy sets for three to six months, instead of every month.

Dr Lim Wee Kiak, head of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Transport, said an obvious way to improve the system would be to "expand the capacity at popular locations". One method, he said, was to free up nearby HDB carparks.

He concurred with the call for an electronic application system. "If we can have an electronic system for the Off-peak Car Scheme, why not this too?"

christan@sph.com.sg

This article was first published in The Straits Times.

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