History
The earliest roads in Singapore, after its founding in 1819, were laid out in the Jackson Plan of 1822 in keeping with Sir Stamford Raffles's directions. A grid system was adopted for the town with roads for carriages being 16 yards (15 m) wide, and those for horses four yards wide. Pedestrian paths along the roadsides were two yards wide, allowing room for two people to walk abreast and giving rise to the five-foot ways that came to be associated with the sheltered walkways along roadside shops.
These roads were fairly advanced for the time, with Macadam surfacing used on High Street, Singapore as early as 1821. Roads were also constructed across the rest of the island, although they were usually unsurfaced. By 1842, Changi Point in the eastern tip was accessible via an extension of Geylang Road, while Pasir Panjang Road reached Jurong River in the west. The Bukit Timah Road was also extended to Kranji in the north by 1845, where the nearby Johor-Singapore Causeway was built almost 80 years later in 1924. Even so, only about 340 kilometres of road were built in the century after 1820, compared to more than 2,000 kilometres in the four decades after 1965.
As with many other urban areas of the time, the earliest modes of road transport were via ponies, and then horse-drawn carriages. Batak ponies from the Sultanate of Deli in Sumatra were introduced into the Malaya in the Dutch era, and were often called palonguins or later gharries. They proved too small for the larger carriages introduced later by the Europeans, whose parades were used as fashion statements for the social elite around the Padang and were soon joined by their affluent Chinese and Arabic counterparts. So important were these parades in the networking opportunities they provided that merchants were known to voluntarily pay to build the public roads or to speed up road construction. Collyer Quay, for example, was constructed purely by private funding.
The most well-to-do would typically own their carriages and horses, often employing native Indian servants (popularly known as Syces) to maintain them. Carriages for hire soon became available as well, with hackneys and gharries being the earliest forms of taxis in Singapore. Another early use of pony-drawn carriages was that of the Singapore Fire Brigade, the predecessor of today's Singapore Civil Defence Force.
Read more about this topic: Driving In Singapore
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