The “park connectors” of Punggol and Sengkang, Singapore

I wrote about Singapore’s “park connectors” in an earlier post. Park connectors are paths for pedestrians and cyclists that now provide access to much of Singapore. They have been built quite self-consciously to promote Singapore’s goal of becoming a “car-lite” society. Despite their name, they often don’t connect parks. Their geography has chiefly been determined by the location of places where it was easy to insert them. This generally means corridors with few road crossings, which end up being for the most part along waterways, lakefronts, and coasts. There are now more than 300 km of such paths. Here’s a map:¹

Map showing park connectors and rail transit lines in Singapore. The “Rail Corridor” is the corridor through which the rail line to Kuala Lumpur once passed; it’s—slowly!—being turned into a recreational trail. The MRT is Singapore’s urban “heavy”-rail system. The LRT (administered jointly with the MRT) is a grade-separated people mover serving certain new towns. “U/C” = “under construction.” GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and from the government of Singapore, modified; see footnote 1.

Most park connectors have been inserted into already built-up parts of the city. I made a point on a recent trip to Singapore of visiting Punggol and its neighbor Sengkang, two of Singapore’s newest “new towns,” where the linear recreational pathways that were later called park connectors were built into the urban fabric from the beginning. I was particularly interested in seeing just how these functioned.

Punggol and Sengkang are in extreme northeastern Singapore. The area in which they’re located was the site of villages many of whose inhabitants were farmers and fishermen as late as the early 1990s, the period when the area was earmarked as the site of two new towns. Thanks to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and then the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, development was rather slow. Many parts of Punggol and Sengkang are still not built up, and there is a great deal of construction going on, especially along the areas’ northern and eastern edges. Here’s a map:

Punggol and Sengkang, Singapore. See previous map for explanation of legend and list of sources.

Like Singapore’s other new towns, Punggol and Sengkang were planned under the influence of “modern” concepts of how to build a city. Buildings do not touch neighboring buildings. Land uses are kept separate. Congestion is avoided. Despite the origin of these towns in the 1990s and their implementation in the 21st century, the ideas of “new urbanism” apparently played no role in determining their basic morphology. There are no vibrant shopping streets in Punggol and Sengkang. The commercial heart of both Punggol and Sengkang is an enclosed mall, set next to the subway station.

Waterway Point, the center of Punggol Central District.

The two subway stations are connected with the rest of Punggol and Sengkang by what are called LRTs in Singapore: miniature driverless trains that some would call people movers.

The LRT in Sengkang.

Essentially all the housing in both Punggol and Sengkang is high-rise housing, mostly put up by the Housing & Development Board (HDB). HDB housing in Punggol and Sengkang, like other new HDB housing Singapore, is of high quality and not easy to distinguish from private housing. The negative stereotype of public housing in the United States or Britain does not apply to Singapore.

Housing in both Punggol and Sengkang is built on very large blocks, through which it’s possible to walk or drive slowly on somewhat irregular paths and streets. There are also arterials, which have a great deal of traffic and which pedestrians must usually cross by bridges. The arterials do have sidewalks, but they take you quite close to the traffic. There are very few pedestrians walking along the arterials.

Sengkang East Drive. Part of a park connector on the right.

The physical geography of Punggol and Sengkang is significant. Most of these areas consist of a low plateau, surrounded on three sides by substantial water barriers. To the north lies the Johor Strait, which separates Singapore from Malaysia; to the east and west are former rivers that have been converted into reservoirs. The Punggol Waterway joins the two reservoirs. The waterways are several meters lower than most of the housing.

The park connectors all lie along the watercourses, just as they do in most parts of Singapore. As a result, there is no cross-traffic to deal with. But it’s almost inevitable that your starting and ending points will be several meters higher than the park connector. The views from the park connectors are often uphill to housing.

Man running along the park connector that follows Punggol Waterway. In the background, up a hill and behind a tree, an LRT train.

My impression was that most park connector use is recreational in nature. There are lots of cyclists (joined, I think unfortunately, by users of what in Singapore are called “personal-mobility devices” (PMDs), that is, electrically powered scooters and bicycles).² There are also a fair number of runners and of people who appear to be fairly serious walkers, or at least dog walkers. Most of the park connectors in Punggol and Sengkang (as well as elsewhere in Singapore) have acquired a solid line to separate pedestrians from cyclists and PMD users; in a few places there are two separate paths. There are only a small number of benches along the park connectors; they do get used, and I rather suspect that additional benches would be appreciated. I wouldn’t describe the park connectors of Punggol and Sengkang as being overwhelmingly crowded at any time, but they aren’t empty either.

Park connector near central Punggol, viewed from a higher roadway bridge.

The fact that the HDB shows what appear to be park connectors in some of its advertisements suggests that people find their presence a positive thing.

Advertisement for Housing & Development Board (HDB) housing near Lorong Halus Bridge, Punggol.

However, it’s almost impossible to imagine that the park connectors would be enormously useful for doing most errands. Even aside from the fact that most trips will end with a climb, the park connectors rarely constitute logical paths to shopping areas, transit stations, or housing. I didn’t see a lot of park connector users who seemed to be on their way to work or who were carrying shopping bags. You do see such people along the park connectors like the Siglap Park Connector that have been inserted into older neighborhoods near Singapore’s center and that are much more likely to take you directly to subway stations, stores, and housing.

The Siglap Park Connector, which runs along an older drainage canal through long-established neighborhoods in southeastern Singapore. It’s pretty clear that, unlike the park connectors in Punggol and Sengkang, this park connector attracts numerous commuters and people doing local errands.

It’s easy to see how the park connectors improve lives for residents of Punggol and Sengkang who want to get a little exercise. I wish all city neighborhoods had them. It’s a little hard to see how they contribute substantially to making Singapore a “car-lite” society. This is not a secret to Singapore’s intelligent and thoughtful planners. A pedestrian path (a “green finger”) from the Punggol Waterway to central Punggol is planned for the future.³ The idea is that this will help integrate the park connectors into the street fabric of Punggol. You’d still usually have to go out of your way to use them, however.