#1253 1990 · Government of Singapore (Ministry of Transport / LTA) · Transportation / urban policy
Singapore stopped taxing cars and started auctioning the legal right to own one at all
问题
Raising car taxes never slowed Singapore's car population, which kept growing 12% a year on a tiny island
背景
By the late 1980s, rising incomes in land-scarce Singapore were driving car ownership up roughly 12% a year, even though the country already carried some of the world's highest car-related taxes and had run the world's first electronic downtown congestion charge, the Area Licensing Scheme, since 1975. Every tool the government had pulled changed the price of owning a car, but none of them capped how many cars the island actually had to absorb onto its finite road network.
The reflex move — raise taxes again — couldn't work as a permanent fix, because it was chasing a moving target: incomes were rising faster than any politically tolerable tax increase, so wealthier buyers kept absorbing higher costs and car numbers kept climbing regardless. A lever built entirely on price could never guarantee a specific number of cars on the road, because price only changes who's willing to pay, not how many are allowed to.
换别人会怎么做
The available levers were all price-based: raise registration fees, raise import duties, raise the annual road tax, or expand the existing downtown congestion charge to cover more roads — every option changed how much a car cost without ever setting a firm ceiling on how many cars the island would actually have to accommodate.
他们看到了什么
Every tax hike was really an indirect bid for a target number of cars. Planners set that number directly as a quota, and let an auction — not a guessed tax rate — discover the price that cleared it.
那一手
On 1 May 1990 Singapore introduced the Vehicle Quota System: the government fixes a hard annual quota of Certificates of Entitlement — permits granting the legal right to register and own a car for ten years — by vehicle category, then auctions that fixed quota off in monthly bidding rounds. Anyone who wants to put a new car on the road must first win a COE at auction, whatever the market-clearing price turns out to be; the number of cars added each year stays capped at the quota regardless of how high demand pushes the price.
为什么管用
A quota fixes the quantity outcome with certainty, something no tax rate can do when demand is driven by rising incomes rather than price sensitivity. The auction format then does the price-discovery work a regulator can't do reliably on its own — bidders reveal their true willingness to pay, the government captures that value as revenue instead of leaving it as unpriced scarcity, and the number of new cars added stays exactly at the quota no matter how high or low that revealed price turns out to be.
值了多少
COE premiums have run from a few hundred dollars in 1990 to over S$100,000 today, while total vehicle numbers stayed pinned to quota.
什么时候会失灵
The mechanism only controls net new registrations, so it does nothing about a population's existing car stock and can be regressive, pricing lower-income buyers out entirely while wealthier residents absorb any premium — a persistent criticism of Singapore's system. It also requires a government with the administrative capacity to run a credible, manipulation-resistant auction and the political will to hold the quota firm even when premiums spike and public pressure to loosen it grows.
后来呢
The scheme is now a standard reference case in transport economics and mechanism-design teaching for converting an open-ended price problem into a fixed-quantity one, and variants of the idea — license-plate lotteries and auctions to physically cap vehicle growth — were later adopted by Chinese megacities including Beijing and Shanghai facing the same congestion pressure.
资料来源
- [1]On This Day In 1990, Singapore's First COE Bidding Kicked OffWonderwall.sg, 2026wonderwall.sg