Fairer fair fares?

Disparities of public concession fares for polytechnic/tertiary students and JC/ITE students do not stand up to scrutiny. The degree of disparity is questionable. Why should a archetypical 17 year old polytechnic student – lets call him Tan – pay as much as 89 percent more than say Lim, his JC counterpart? It is probable that Tan is from a humbler family background than Lim. Furthermore, studying in a polytechnic per se will not improve Tan’s financial situation vis-a-vis Lim. I am not too sure about the respective school fees but Tan’s might actually have to pay more. Also, considering the lower number of polytechnics, among other things being equal, Tan probably has to travel further and incur greater costs on a daily basis to reach his school. From the needs based perspective generally, and I also believe that students should not have to worry too much about public transport fares, the disparities in the concession fares is unsound. 

On the flip side, from the cost perspective, it does mean it will likely cost more to subsidize Tan. Also, the burden of any increase in concessions is likely to fall on the other public transport users. I think that will be counter-productive considering the fact the government is encouraging increase usage of public transport. I feel that to avoid this, a mechanism should and could be found to place the burden of subsidies of public transport on private road users. For example and perhaps rather simplistically – we can peg 15 percent of any taxes on fuel or/and ERP prices to such subsidies. This will also not only avoid the public perception that the government is “making money” from high fuel prices or the “ERP”, it will be a continued incentive for Singaporeans to take public transport and in so doing, ease road congestion for private road users.