Recently, it has been announced
that teachers will be charged for parking at their place of work (schools) (1)
and so will military personnel (2) (3). On the other hand, as I highlighted in
a previous post (4), public space has been reserved for parking of privately
owned and for-profit operated bike leasing companies.
I found it a bit strange.
Yes there is a move to decrease
the number of cars and increasing the use of ‘greener’ transportation methods
(electric cars, car-pooling but also bicycles)(5) but is that a reason? Do we
want our teachers to cycle to work so they are fitter and set an example for
their students and fight obesity in schools?
Do we think that portly people in
military attire are unsightly (6) and aren’t the regular incentivised programs
(7) sufficient to tackle the problem?
Even if that was the case, then
why, on the other hand, subsidise the commercial profit making businesses that
own the bikes and play in the ‘bike-sharing’ space?
I know that for many people the
word ‘subsidy’ is quasi-taboo, but I am not using it lightly. In fact, one of
the reasons why teachers have to pay for parking at their places of work is
precisely to ‘remove the subsidy’ that they had been enjoying:
"Such practices are
tantamount to providing hidden subsidies for vehicle parking and are not in
line with the requirements laid down in the Government Instruction
Manuals," the AGO had said.(8).
Saying teachers are being taxed therefore
is an exaggeration, but to the person having to pay for something they did not
have to pay is equivalent to a tax; bottom-line you have less to spend.
As for the military bases, the
rule doesn’t apply across the board, but only to specially chosen bases where ““Due
to their proximity to public amenities, the car parks in these camps are deemed
to have market value,” the ministry said” (9). For teachers it is across the
board.
Do I really mean that the money
taken from the pockets of teachers and military personnel gets transferred to
the pockets of the owners of the for-profit bike-sharing companies? Of course
not.
But do I find that the policies,
while each standing on their own arguments contradict each other? Yes. And that
is my point.
Remember the fish-ball-stick
incident? (10) It illustrated the fact that different government agencies were
not coordinated and that coordination is now the job of the Municipal Services
Office (MSO).
Actually, interestingly, in one of my previous roles, we had
proposed to the government agencies a system that would take the feedback
received from the public and automatically distribute it to the right authority
or combination of authorities to deal with. But then we were told the MSO was
already on the way. (You see, analytics can even help clear fish-ball sticks,
just attach a drone haha).
Ahum, so am I saying that this
tax and subsidise issue could have been prevented, or at least highlighted to
the relevant authorities?
To put it simply, yes. What I did
was simple: I realised what the implications of different policies were, what
space in economics they occupied, then I saw that their positions were in
opposition not to say contradictory. Is it difficult to build a simple analytics
based system to do that? No, it is not that complicated and there are quite a
few algorithms that can help get the topics, stuff like LDA (11) or LSA (12),
or a simple Bayesian classifier (13). Then it’s a question of comparing
documents on the same topic.
“Data Science” to the rescue? Anyone
in the government would like to know more? :D
2 https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/mindef-charge-parking-fees-6-more-camps-and-bases-current-10
3 Actually in the latter case the work places where the
payment is being implemented has increased, not a totally new policy
5 Note that companies like grab (and uber) do not make the
world greener, on the contrary. The price point of such companies is lower than
regular taxis but higher than busses/trains which are more efficient means of
transport. SO moving people away from taxis to grab does not make a huge green
dent, but moving people from busses/trains to moves people to less green means
of transport. That could be the topic of another blogpost... J
6 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/09/dutch-military-parade-bans-fat-participants-the-hague
8 as (1), AGO means Audit-General’s Office
9 as (2) above, the ministry being the ministry of defence.
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