Electronic Road Pricing gantries located at an entrance to Singapore's Central Business District to regulate vehicle flow through dynamic tolling.
SINGAPORE · May 4, 2026 : While Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and architect Norman Foster recently converged at Bloomberg CityLab Madrid to declare that the modern city begins with the removal of the car, Singapore remains the world’s most clinical case study in that reality. While Paris has spent twelve years using political persuasion and tactical urbanism to retroactively fix its car dependency, Singapore stopped debating the necessity of restricted access in 1975. By shifting from negotiation to pricing, the city-state built an environment where the car is an expensive anomaly rather than an entitlement.
The Legacy of the 1975 Mandate
Singapore’s approach to urban density was never about winning hearts and minds; it was about the math of space. In 1975, the city launched the Area Licensing Scheme, the world’s first congestion pricing model. By 1998, this evolved into Electronic Road Pricing (ERP), a system of gantries that adjusts tolls in real-time based on traffic speeds. Where other global cities struggle with the political fallout of removing parking or lanes, Singapore’s governance framework treats road space as a finite utility. The result is a city that functions with a 70% public transit mode share, a figure Paris is still striving to stabilize through massive infrastructure retrofits.
Governance vs. Persuasion
The "Singapore Model" goes beyond simple tolls. The Certificate of Entitlement (COE) system effectively caps the total vehicle population, ensuring that urban growth does not lead to terminal gridlock. At the Norman Foster Institute, researchers highlight that while Hidalgo’s Paris represents a triumph of political will over a century of car-centric design, Singapore represents a city designed to prevent that calcification entirely. It made by strict governance what Paris is currently making through long-term social persuasion.
Source: [Bloomberg CityLab Madrid April 27 / Bloomberg Graphics Paris 2026 / CNN Paris Hidalgo / Norman Foster Institute]
