Driving in Singapore
overview of driving in Singapore
In Singapore, cars and other vehicles drive on the left side of the road, as in neighbouring Malaysia, due to its British colonial history (which led to British driving rules being adopted in India, Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong as well). As a result, most vehicles are right-hand drive. However, exemptions have been made to allow foreign vehicles and construction machineries to utilise the road space of Singapore. As such, vehicles with left hand drive configurations are required to either be driven with a sign indicating "LEFT-HAND-DRIVE" or towed.
The per-capita car ownership rate in Singapore is approximately 12 cars per 100 people (or 1 car per 8.25 people).
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 as early as 1821. Roads were also constructed across the rest of the island, although they were usually unsurfaced.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5308083. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1819, 1822 and 1821.
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This entry incorporates text from “Driving in Singapore” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.