The Government has implemented various initiatives in recent years to foster a greener transport system. To build a more environmentally-friendly public bus fleet, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) has been working with bus operators and manufacturers to conduct hybrid and diesel bus trials. As the preliminary results are encouraging, we will be stepping up to larger-scale trials in the next couple of years.
As part of Singapore’s Electric Vehicle (EV) Phase 2 Test-bed, which aims to explore the viability of operating fleets of EVs for car-sharing and of electric taxis, LTA and the Economic Development Board (EDB) have worked with HDT Singapore Taxis Pte Ltd to bring in Singapore’s first fully-electric taxi fleet, which began operating in September 2016 as part of an eight-year trial.
LTA and EDB have also partnered BlueSG Pte Ltd to launch the BlueSG EV car-sharing programme in December 2017, which will see 1,000 shared EVs deployed across all HDB towns by 2020, and the installation of 2,000 charging points island-wide. This will lay the foundation for a national EV charging network to support EV proliferation moving forward.
With effect from 1 January 2018, the Vehicular Emissions Scheme (VES) will replace the Carbon Emissions-Based Vehicle Scheme (CEVS) for all new cars, taxis and newly imported used cars. In addition to the CO2 criterion in the CEVS, the VES will cover four other pollutants - hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM). The VES rebate or surcharge for a car or taxi will be determined by its worst-performing pollutant. This is to encourage buyers to choose models that have lower emissions across all criteria and are cleaner overall. Similar to the CEVS, the rebate and surcharge for taxis under the VES will be 50 per cent higher to encourage taxi companies to adopt lower-emission models for their fleets, as taxis generally clock higher mileage than cars.
The Early Turnover Scheme (ETS) for commercial vehicles has also been enhanced with effect from 1 August 2017 to incentivise owners of Category C diesel vehicles with Euro 2 or Euro 3 emission standards to turnover to Euro 6 (or equivalent) vehicles. This is to encourage vehicle owners to replace their older and more pollutive diesel vehicles with newer and cleaner models, in line with the Government’s efforts to improve air quality by reducing vehicular emissions.
