The investment in autonomous driver technology will form another facet of the Singapore government’s drive to narrow down the numbers of private vehicle owners, currently influenced by prohibitive taxes placed on top of the price of private vehicles.
Their approach works, with only 600,000 privately owned and rental cars currently on the roads, among a population of 5.6 million. A 15-year plan to reduce privately owned vehicles also encompasses promoting ride-sharing schemes and public transport.
Introducing autonomous ride-sharing options would decrease Singaporeans reliance on cars to get them to public transport stops. These initiatives would be aimed at tackling the well-recognised ‘last mile’ problem in public transport, meaning the issue of how people access public transport from their homes which may be remote from a transport hub.
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