Spatial disconnectivity: Singapore's perspective on cycling

Cycling plays an increasingly important role in sustainable urban mobility, offering benefits such as reduced carbon emissions, traffic decongestion, recreational opportunities and improved public health. This is aligned with Singapore’s city-in-nature concept and our commitment to car-lite options in the Singapore Green Plan with an expansion to 1300km park connectors, fulfilling Sustainability Development Goals 11 and 13. Despite expansive measures, less than 2% of residents cycle to work, signalling a need to move beyond isolated infrastructural interventions. This research aims to synthesise evidence of fragmented cycling infrastructure, highlighting a spatial mismatch, and explore how park connector design and accessibility influence cycling habits, encouraging active mobility opportunities in daily commutes.

Utilising Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data to spatially map cycling infrastructure across 12,877 HDB residential flats in 55 planning areas, I aim to integrate various access-to-cycling-infrastructure indices for each flat and aggregate the flat-specific metrics to the town level to assess residential access to cycling infrastructure. This highlights that cycling facilities are clustered in the Northeast and Northwest regions, leaving residential towns with inconsistent links to recreational and commuting routes. Additionally, fragmented connections, inconsistent end-of-trip facilities, and bottlenecks at intersections increase collision risks, reducing safety and providing inconvenient cycling experiences, discouraging active mobility. This shows a failure to close the mobility loop, as inconvenient commutes deter residents towards car-lite options. As such, I plan to identify systematic spatial gaps in connectivity, particularly in HDB towns with complex road layouts or missing cycling links and highlight the need to move beyond green corridor expansion, prioritising the connectivity of cycling pathways.