Cycling in Singapore: A study in contrasts

I was lucky enough to spend a week holidaying with my partner in Singapore back in early August. We did a lot of fun activities around this equatorial island and mostly survived the sweltering heat.

Bikes and pedestrians sharing paths in Singapore

Of course, ever the transport engineer, I was curious to see what the mobility options were like around the city state. We certainly did our fair share of buses, trains, walking, and even driving. And, while we didn’t end up jumping on any bikes while there, we certainly took in how their cycling works over there…

Cycle networks around Singapore: building up but not yet joining all the dots

We did briefly consider finding some hire-bikes and using them to do some of our travelling around. But, in looking at the bike network map for the island, it seemed that there were few cycling routes near where we were staying (downtown). Indeed, the road outside our hotel seemed downright cycle-unfriendly…

A typical urban road in Singapore – not sure that I’d bike there…

Despite this, we were intrigued with how many people we did actually see biking on many of the busy roads around the city. Many of them were your typical “road bike” aficionado – certainly sports cycling is quite popular around Singapore.

Certainly saw plenty of these riders around the city

But there were also plenty of people riding far more ordinary bikes on-road as well – and not necessarily adhering to the road rules either…

A one-way street but it didn’t stop a few people from riding the other way…

Probably more intriguing was the amount of footpath cycling (including around where we were staying). Apparently it is legal for people to ride unpowered bikes and kick-scooters on footpaths in Singapore (electric ones should be on designated cycle paths or the road).

Ding, ding! Coming through…

It certainly meant that you had to keep your wits about you when walking, although some were good about dinging their bells. Even shared paths you had to pay attention to where the cycling bits were.

Downtown cycling path next to the footpath

Aside from the traffic concerns, probably one of the reasons that people were footpath riding a fair bit was the widespread presence of public share bikes around the city.

Blue and green bikes everywhere…

There seemed to be two main bike operators; Anywheel (green) and HelloRide (blue), both with some kind of app for activating and paying – a third operator SG Bike had stopped although you still occasionally saw their orange bikes around.

Bus stops were a regular location for share bike parking

Many of the bus stops around the city had a designated yellow bike parking area nearby where people could collect and drop off their share bike.

Designated parking spaces for share bikes

Another thing I noticed a lot of were fold-up Brompton bikes; at one point I saw about eight in a row ride past me. In a place like Singapore this actually makes sense because (1) many people live in small apartments with limited space and (2) they often take them on the bus or train to get to places.

We came across a shop that sold a variety of Brompton bikes

The other intriguing sight I came across was a cycleway inside a big shopping mall…

I have certainly not come across this before…

The indoor route even had designated pedestrian crossing points and flashing centreline lights…

Look both ways…

Turns out that there was a cycle hub there with bike repairs, showers and parking – you could actually access it from the outside as well.

Bike hub this way – not sure about these bollards…

Singapore is ambitiously developing their cycling network; already they’ve got over 500km of cycle routes and plan to have 1300km by 2030. It’s probably a very necessary thing to counteract the still very busy road network they have (the public transport system can only do so much). Whether that and the various bikeshare services are enough to get more people onto bikes over there remains to be seen – at present, cycling mode share in Singapore is barely above 1%. Here’s hoping we might see some tangible growth over time…

Another shared path next to another busy road – but where are the bikes?

Have you visited Singapore? What did you think of the cycling?

 

 

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