Peggy Heng parking at a handicapped lot

Posted on March 24, 2013 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Confessions:Celeb blogger parked at handicap lot deliberately’, 23 March 2013, article in asiaone.com

In a Facebook confession reported by Stomp recently, local blogger and model Peggy Heng talks about parking at a handicapped lot because the rest of the lots had been taken up by illegally parked cars. In an earlier report, the blogger had drawn criticism when she produced a video to promote a dating event. She then gained attention again after undergoing plastic surgery to further her career.

A Stomp reader Kelly saw Peggy’s facebook posting and said:

“Blogger Peggy Heng proudly declared parking at a handicapped lot.”

Here is the full post on Peggy’s facebook page:

“Parking at the handicapped lot at my house carpark now because of too many cars parking illegally here (even when only season parking is allowed for overnight). “I’ve been too kind… As much as I can, I try to refrain from calling the authorities to do something about it. “But these inconsiderate people just gotta go all out and leave me with not even ONE lot around the blocks. “Good luck and happy summon day :) “

Peggy later published a furious ‘clarification’ to explain how she had sought permission by the HDB to park in that ‘stupid handicapped lot’ and that she was entitled to a parking space being a season parking holder. Having returned home at 3 am I’d suppose if you’re desperate for a bath and sleep, an empty slot usually reserved for the disabled is as tantalising as a warm bed. But probably not as irresistible as posting about it on Facebook.

Most people wouldn’t brag about how they scored a handicapped lot. For one, it makes you look like an uncaring swine. Second, even if forced by circumstance to park in a disabled lot (if you see smoke coming out of your house), at the risk of being fined $50 for it, you should have the decency to repark your car the very next morning and keep your fingers crossed that nobody noticed for that short few hours. It’s possible that not a single disabled person in your neighbourhood drives, though you’d still need a mandatory space to allow for that occasional one popping by for a visit.

According to the Code on Accessibility, that’s about 1 disabled spot for every 50 lots. For some, a fine isn’t a sufficient deterrent because rich Mercedes motorists can easily afford it. Some are also known to reuse handicapped labels once they’ve recovered mobility, or create their own fake labels altogether. It may not even be inconsiderate or imposter drivers; you could have rubbish bins or panel railings blocking the area, defeating the purpose of disabled lots in the first place.  It would also be awkward if you’re forced to park your wedding limo in a disabled lot while picking up your bride, only to come back to the sight of someone threatening to smash your windows with crutches. You also wouldn’t want to run into trouble with THIS guy below. Yes, the one with arm tattoos.

How Audi-cious!

Illegal parking aside, the other bane of civility is the abuse of disabled toilets. Statistically speaking, the chance of a disabled person using a toilet is higher than one parking a car. The intrusion into one’s intimate right to relieve oneself is as mean as taking his rightful parking space or priority seat. It’s probably OK to use handicapped loos if you’re about to shit your pants or you need to get changed quickly and the rest of the cubicles are either occupied or choked with stinky floaters. But more often than not disabled, spacious toilets are used more for a different sort of relief (the sexual kind) than that which they’re intended for, yet people get fined for stealing parking spaces, but get off scot-free for doing their dirty business on toilet seats and grab bars other than taking a dump. You may not get fined for sleeping on priority seats, but your reputation may be ruined forever.

Some people, never having to hobble around on one leg in their entire lives, question why the disabled should be given so much love and attention when it comes to toilets. It’s an unsympathetic, economical question to ask, none delivered with more fine cussing than another celebrity blogger, Xiaxue. In a controversial 2005 post about her brother getting blasted by someone in the disabled loo, she asked:

So tell me … our government spent millions of taxpayers’ money to build so many facilities for the physically disabled, and only they are allowed to use it?

Exclusive use would be possible if we didn’t have so many damn people around. We tend to forget that these disabled may not be permanently so; anyone of us would rue the day we hogged such spaces for our own selfish ends when we fracture a femur or suffer blisters on all our toes. Enforcement can only do so much to create the inclusive society that we are so fond of promoting. In a ‘me-first’, overcrowded Singapore that is hooked on automobiles despite an extensive network of public transport, we still have plenty to catch up in terms of graciousness. I believe the disabled and the able-bodied can get along and share public spaces with a little give and take; If I’m wheelchair bound I wouldn’t mow down kids playing on the MRT ramp when they should jolly well use the steps. Likewise, if I’m an able person and someone with their entire head in a cast asks if he could cut my taxi queue, I would gladly oblige. Let’s not argue about entitlements to the point that our infirmed start rigging their wheelchairs with battering rams and flamethrowers shall we.

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Filed under: 2013, Bloggers, Fines, Justice system/Lawsuits, Motorists | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Nicoll Highway speed camera not transparent to motorists

Posted on December 20, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Wrong to hide speed cameras from motorists’, 20 Dec 2012, ST Forum

(Emmanuel David): I RECENTLY received a notice from the Traffic Police informing me that my car was caught by a speed camera near lamp post 107 along Nicoll Highway in the direction of Guillemard Road. After revisiting the site several times, I discovered no notices along that stretch of Nicoll Highway notifying motorists of the presence of a speed camera.

There appeared to be a platform for a speed camera near lamp post 107, but no camera was mounted, and the platform was hidden from the view of motorists. I understand that Britain, Australia and many American states, as well as neighbouring Malaysia, have strict laws specifying that the use of speed cameras must be transparent to motorists.

…At a time when there are visibly fewer Traffic Police officers patrolling our roads, and an increasing dependence on speed cameras, it is important that the use of such third-party devices is governed by legislation. Almost all other speed cameras in Singapore would adhere to such a law if it was promulgated, but the one along Nicoll Highway did not when I was driving past it.

Everyone speeds at some point behind the wheel and most get away with it. When we do get caught it’s only natural to be defensive, denying that we exceeded the speed limit or hope that the camera snapped the wrong car or malfunctioned. Those of us who could afford it and know that we broke the law pay other people to take the rap. The rest of us, like the writer here, blame traffic legislation, display some futile worldliness about other nations’ laws and even conduct our own field sleuthing in an attempt to save face, without admitting whether we had in fact been speeding or not. It’s like you got fined for littering and complained to the officer about the lack of warning signs in the vicinity, or better still, for ambushing you from behind a pillar and violating your right to litter freely and not get caught.

Some would argue that instead of reducing accidents, making speed cameras VISIBLE and bright orange would actually wreck havoc on the roads when motorists jam brakes after spotting the box at the last minute. The same could happen to oblivious drivers who fail to pay attention to road signs telling you there’s a speed trap ahead. Yet, all the speed cameras, bush-raiders and signs in the world won’t help if you don’t even know what the speed limit is (up to 70% of road users). Maybe if a certain Ferrari driver had been snooped by hidden speed cameras and deprived of his licence earlier, a horrible accident could have been prevented.

In the 60′s we had human speed detectors in the form of the traffic police instead of ‘third-party devices’, who were believed to be constantly lurking behind trees or bushes stalking their prey, their motorbike wheel or side of helmet sticking our ridiculously behind a trunk. But it’s not just victims behind the wheel getting ‘punked’. You could be caught unawares jaywalking, smoking in a non-smoking area, or jerking off alone in a cinema. And it doesn’t matter if the one exposing you is a mysterious overhanging box, a squealer, someone with an invisible cloak or an undercover cop dressed as the usher. You lucked out, that is all.

Drivers will generally agree that there should be deterrents to road hazards; it’s only when they get their demerit points when they decide to blame the police for sneaky tactics and lament the lack of ‘transparency’. I mean, why not just do away with ‘undercover’ jobs altogether and put CCTV signs EVERYWHERE so that we’ll rid this country of all forms of shady dealings and misdemeanours altogether? Anyone who speeds and risks hurting another being deserves the full penalty of the law, whether you felt that the snare was unfair to you or not. Anyone who complains to the public about traffic injustice without addressing road safety or personal responsibility ALL the more deserves a ticket too.

Filed under: 1960s, 2012, Fines, Justice system/Lawsuits, Motorists | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Traffic warden beaten up to kopitiam applause

Posted on September 23, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Traffic wardens become punching bags’, 23 Sept 2012, article by Bryna Sim, Sunday Times

…In an especially nasty incident earlier this month, Mr Pannirselvam, 47 (traffic warden), said a lorry driver who had just been issued a summons for illegal parking in Upper Serangoon Road walked up to him calmly and shoved a packet of piping hot fried noodles at his face. “I did not see that coming because the driver was not acting aggressively,” he said.

But that was not all. The driver then began punching him on his face and body. He stopped only when the electronic hand-held terminal, used for recording and printing out summonses, fell from Mr Pannirselvam’s hands.

“People at the nearby coffee shop who saw what was happening did not help,” he said. “Instead, they clapped.”

…It does not help that the hours are long and the pay is low. Traffic wardens work around 12 hours a day, six days a week. Depending on the amount of overtime done, their gross salary is about $1,800.

For the same long hours, traffic wardens could get almost twice their current salary if they switched to the far less hazardous job of dishwashing at Sakae Sushi instead. From the days of being called ‘parking attendants’ to today’s derogatory  ‘summon aunties’ who ‘no pang chance’, going around booking errant, angry ‘ah beng’ drivers has to be one of the most thankless jobs ever conceived. Not only do you get bashed until your handheld device falls out of your clutches, your bloody, humiliating plight becomes a glorious spectacle for others. You also get racially stereotyped, and given names like Auntie Fatimah or Hamidah when your name is actually neither. Or you could be named after a dead celebrity (Feng Fei Fei). I wonder why.

Hats off to Summon Aunties

Being a coupon enforcer does no one favours other than the stat boards that recruit them for the dirty work that they can’t bear to do themselves. They also can’t ‘pang chance’ due to auditors checking to see if they’re on the ball. For their tireless summoning in the hot sun and taking the risk of being lynch-mobbed by kopitiam uncles, even if they can be overzealous and too by-the-book at times, the least that one can do is NOT give a standing ovation when they’re being bludgeoned by psychos. It may be safe to roam the streets at night in Singapore, but not if you’re an enforcement officer in a parking lot looking for vehicles to summon.

Scalded in the face by a pack of char bee hoon aside, other malicious, bizarre attacks in the history of parking warden abuse include:

I think some basic self-defence is on order. Or at least have the hand-held terminal do double duty as an emergency taser. By exposing themselves to killer litter in addition to hooligans, maybe Certis Cisco should equip wardens with standard issue HELMETS instead of straw hats. If employers can’t do anything about the mockery and bad reputation, at least offer some protection, like REAL police officers on watch to prevent them from being flattened by irate drivers. Coupon cheats aside, perhaps wardens should also include in their job scope the authority to fine parking IDIOTS too. Maybe then, just maybe, someone may finally come to their aid whenever drivers start hurling things, be it vulgarities or food. As I said earlier, Douglas Foo is waiting.

Filed under: 1970s, 1980s, 2012, Bureaucrats, Fines, Justice system/Lawsuits, Motorists, Violence | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Singaporeans suffering from litter campaign fatigue

Posted on October 30, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Add garbage bins, chuck banners’, 30 Oct 2011, article by Grace Chua, Sunday Times

…The ‘dustbin test’ carried out at four town centres was part of a sociological study conducted by the National Environment Agency, with experts from the National University of Singapore led by sociologist Paulin Straughan.

…Its key findings: 62.6 per cent of the 4,500 people surveyed say they never litter; 1.2 per cent are hardcore litterbugs who admit to dropping their trash most of the time; and 36.2 per cent do it out of convenience.

Smokers insisted that it was culturally acceptable to flick their cigarette butts away after smoking, and students and young people were more likely to litter. To cut down littering, the researchers tested four different litter-control methods at four town centres: more bins; banners encouraging binning; having more uniformed NEA officers around; and stationing volunteers to spread environmental messages.

They found that having more bins cut littering most at Tampines while using volunteers cut littering in Bedok by about 30 per cent. Banners, generally, failed to have an effect. ‘Singaporeans may be suffering from campaign fatigue, being tired of being told what they should do as good citizens,’ the study suggested.

Paradoxically, having enforcement officers around reinforced the idea that littering was okay. Singaporeans do tend to litter and the presence of enforcement officers only serves to remind them that this is the fact, the study suggested.

According to the report, the researchers used a ‘drop-off pick-up methodology for data collection’ to ‘alleviate the effects of social desirability’. Even if this meant that the subjects were anonymous, I have my doubts about the high rate of ‘obedient’ results i.e I NEVER Litter because i) it’s socially unacceptable to litter and subjects may be pressured into lying ii) The results do not reflect the state of cleanliness today (otherwise there’s no need for this survey in the first place), and iii) Nobody wants to admit that they are ‘hardcore litterbugs’ (aside from the 1.2%). It’s like asking people if they watch bestiality porn on the Internet. A similar question was posed to subjects in a Kindness survey some months back, whereby 88% self-proclaimed graciousness. It would be interesting to combine these indicators to see how many ‘kind’ people actually litter.

But what’s troubling is the list of lazy excuses people cite for littering, which include ‘lack of litter bins’, ‘acceptable to litter in places that are already dirty’ and the absurdly ironic ‘lack of REMINDERS’, especially since results show that campaigning had absolutely no impact on cleanliness. Everybody KNOWS it’s wrong to litter, and the campaigns, no matter how creatively one pitches the disincentives for littering (CWO, fines etc),  somehow lack the necessary nudge to get our act together. Having more bins and volunteers improving the state of litter, i.e SPOILING Singaporeans, also doesn’t do anything about improving our ‘civic consciousness’. It’s the same rate of people throwing stuff away, just an increased rate of ‘clearance’ (and more work for cleaners) giving the illusion that there’s ‘less littering”.

Maybe the problem lies in the ‘everyone is doing it and they don’t get caught’ mentality, exemplified by the statistic that ’52.1%’ of subjects felt that ‘leaving an empty Coke bottle by the side of a full bin‘ is NOT considered littering.  It exposes our ‘maid mentality’ and over-reliance on not just bins, but people to pick up after us. Singaporeans also don’t have a ‘bring your trash home’ mentality, which could be the result of a certain expectation of dustbins being available wherever we go, which, ironically is a product of our ‘clean and green’ campaigning being ‘too successful’; a case of the law of unintended consequences at work. One should also look at how much FOOD we allow to go to waste (or what I would term ‘preventable’ trash), a symptom of ‘affluenza’ and over-consumption which is much harder to treat or enforce.

Somehow the oft-used analogy of treating our public spaces as we would our ‘homes’ doesn’t work, simply because everyone else doesn’t feel the same way and we see other people’s trash as ‘their problem’.  Which is perfectly normal; there’s simply no pay-off for a thankless sacrifice which few would care to emulate. It’s easy to put this to the test:  Plant a relatively sterile piece of litter, a flyer perhaps, on the floor of a busy MRT station. See how long it takes before someone picks it up. Chances are that person is a SMRT staff. If we suffer from the ‘bystander effect’ every time a human being lays sprawled motionless on the floor, what more a piece of paper?

We could say the social cost of littering is insufficient to overcome the ‘convenience’ of littering. People make quick risk  calculations everytime they decide to drop a load, especially for ‘less obvious’ forms of litter like dog pee or faeces, pocket lint, dried mucus, pastry crumbs, parking coupon debris etc, and we give ourselves excuses for our act (It will fertilise the plants, it will decompose, the birds will eat it etc). A certain degree of inconsideration has somehow become a norm, and probability theory tells us that the more people subscribing to a ‘norm’, the less likely you’ll get penalised for it. You can teach a Singaporean how to step on a foot lever to dump his trash, but you can never change his habits or teach EMPATHY, which to me, is what’s really missing here. Littering wouldn’t happen if people simply CARED enough. Increasing the number of bins is simplistic, and we would do well to study relatively ‘bin-less’ societies like Japan before implementing this ‘solution’ lock, stock and barrel.

If campaigns, enforcement, habitual changes and population control  are useless and placing bins all over the place is impractical (maybe even counter-productive), what then can we do to curb littering? I would propose for the sake of argument , ignoring all the ethical difficulties involved,  a combination of public shaming and ‘mercenary’ active citizenry as a drastic measure, which is like plainclothes officers and CCTVs except cheaper and with greater reach. Which means dumping the various ‘soft approaches’, and acknowledging that a filthy Singapore is a serious problem that justifies a slight breach of human rights.  Catch someone in the act via photo or video, post it uncensored online anonymously and get paid for it (In case you’re thinking we already have ‘citizen journalism’, most littering isn’t sensational enough to warrant a Stomp publication). It’s like the reward in a Wanted poster, graded according to the heinousness of the crime . Such clandestine ‘hired spying’ would serve as a much better deterrent to the litterbug (knowing there are greedy eyes out there watching him), while serving as a incentive to those desperate for a quick buck. Think of it as a contest with a draconian twist. So instead of installing dustbins for lazy people every 50 metres and paying cleaners for overtime, which merely treats the SYMPTOM of littering, put a price on the litterbug’s head instead and play with simple incentives  (avoidance of humiliation, greed, ‘busybody-ness’) which any Singaporean would respond to. Only then will the 62% of civic-minded citizens be taken seriously.

Filed under: 2011, Campaigns/Elections, Environment, Fines | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Pay to lose

Posted on February 28, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From Logic, be gone: Let the dice roll posted 28 feb 2010 from 4Hoteliers website.

As a permanent resident, I have to pay a one-day S$100 entry levy or S$2,000 for an annual pass and I am told they have very sophisticated screening or location-based devices that will be able to tell if you’ve been in there for more than 24 hours or not. If you overstay, you risk a S$1,000 fine.

So I have to pay money to lose money?

Filed under: 2010, Casino/gambling, Fines, Money | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Fine zebra crossers

Posted on February 15, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From Untitled, 2 Aug 1977 Letters to ST

May I suggest that pedestrians should not be allowed to wait at crossing junctions or zebra crossings if they are not crossing the road.

It might be an effective measure to issue warning tickets or impose fines to those who wish to mislead the drivers.

Ed: Maybe they’re just taking an awful time looking left and right. Or maybe we should fine you drivers for ignoring zebra crossings. Or maybe if we impose the fines on waiting and not stopping at zebra crossings, the traffic councils would earn enough revenue to eradicate ERP totally.

Filed under: 1970s, Fines, Motorists, Pedestrians | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Go visiting also kena summon

Posted on February 11, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From No sign of goodwill 3 February 1982 Letters to ST

HDB’s car park’s division seemed to be on a fining spree during the festive season, sticking white chits on cars that have extended the parking time on the parking coupons.

Some flexibility should have been exercised during the Chinese New Year, when it is normal for the young to visit their parents.

Filed under: 1980s, Chinese New Year, Fines | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

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