How to fix the COE system
What kind of COE you bid for should depend on what kind of person you are
A CAR’S Certificate of Entitlement (COE) now reliably costs six figures. Darn that Joe Biden.
But this situation is obviously untenable, because who can come up with six figures for the pleasure of driving a Chinese EV?
It’s not as if cars are a special privilege reserved for the elites of society. We have Good Class Bungalows for that.
Nay, ordinary people need cars. Yet, the fundamental flaw of the COE system is that it ignores this human element. It assigns categories to vehicles based on the beefiness of their motors or the size of their engines.
Excellent criteria for a bodybuilding contest, but no longer a sensible way to ensure that the right cars go to the right sort.
Clearly, COEs should be tagged to people instead of cars, so I’m proposing a simple tweak: Just one class of COE, and the people who want one are put into categories that entitle them to a discount or impose a surcharge.
Buyers who fall into our new “Category A” get the maximum discount, call it 50 per cent. Someone whose trend-defyingly large household needs a seven-seat multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) would qualify, since ferrying a small sports team around is a highly efficient use of road space, but more so because having to drive an MPV is punishment enough.
On the other hand, I am the only driver in a two-person household. I have no children that I know of who need to be ferried from A to B (A being home and B being everywhere).
If I had six cars, only one would be on the road at any given time. No one could cause less congestion than I. Ergo, someone like me is made for Category A – or at least, that’s my argument, though reasonable people might disagree.
That brings us to Category B, where neither a discount nor surcharge applies. The backbone of society belongs here – the hordes of ordinary, hard-working Singaporeans who aspire to live a good life so they can complain about it.
Nuclear families obviously qualify, because how can we expect children to stay sullenly glued to their screens, heedless of all around them, unless they are comfortably inside daddy’s car?
Additional filters are needed, because parents are legion.
If your children greet their elders and laugh at my jokes, you deserve the chance to bid in Category B, too. You, I don’t mind sharing the roads with. Own a pet? Straight to Cat B. We need kind drivers.
Category C is for the undiscerning. This applies to Ferrari drivers, but only the wrong kind – if you take it to the track fewer than six times a year, or if it’s spotted outside a KTV three times, then you pay triple. Think of it as a flashy git tax.
Conversely, if you’re the kind of person who clips their toenails on the bus or watches videos on their phone without ear buds, no COE for you, ever. You’re obviously too inconsiderate to drive.
Come to think of it, you should be banned from the bus, too. Stay home, and don’t come out until you can function like a civilised person.
This system of mine could obviously use some refinement. Still, it recognises that different people have different needs, while being predicated on what many have forgotten: COEs are not meant to be inclusive, but to exclude people.
Buyers should be able to accept that. As long as the person being excluded is someone else.
