Air pollution from the use of private-hire vehicles and taxis reduced.
Data from Singapore’s Land Transport Authority reveals that after the COVID-19 dip in April 2020, ridership remains lower than pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, demand forecasts by major PHV companies such as Grab have issued statements suggesting that ridership will remain 80% of pre-pandemic levels.
In more promising news, there is also a fall in the number of PHV and taxi drivers, approximately 88 per cent and 81 per cent respectively of pre-pandemic levels
Why might this be the case?
Perhaps it is due to decentralisation and the work-from-home phenomenon.
What the work-from-home phenomenon and endemic status of the COVID-19 may mean for the environment is perhaps cleaner air.
Pandemic induced retrenchments could also be seeing a reversal as employees in the gig economy have re-skilled and/or up-skilled, while companies have reorganised themselves to take in new hires.
The endemic status of the COVID-19 virus could also be faced with changing perceptions. Vaccines, booster shots and less severe symptoms are likely to have boosted the psychological resilience against what was once a deadly virus. This could have increased the ridership count for public transportation. As I noticed, office workers remain jostled up in the close confines of MRT cabins and continue to lower their masks while at work.
Coupled together, these two scenarios speak to the reduction in carbon emissions from traffic. As traffic constitutes one of Singapore’s larger source of greenhouse gasses, it could be said that the pandemic was beneficial for the environment, albeit a more reduced impact since vehicle ridership has increased since the ridership lows of April 2020.
If an average car emits 4.7 metric tonnes of carbon emissions annually, the reduction in ridership produces the equivalent of the removal of 345 cars for each month. Even though this figure makes a small dent in the 839,000 cars in Singapore in 2021, perhaps it signals towards a greater tendency for residents to use public transport for cross-island travel and alternative transportation modes to access their decentralised town hubs.
In some sense, you could say that because of COVID-19, I can breathe just a little better 🙂