COMMUTERS may be able to use their "contactless" credit and debit cards to pay for bus and train rides in future, as part of a new payment option the Land Transport Authority (LTA) is exploring.

With the system, commuters can tap their credit cards in and out at train station fare gantries or on bus card readers, just like using stored-value fare cards.

But there will be no need for top-ups. Commuters will be charged for their trips through their credit or debit cards, similar to a post-paid telco subscription or a utility bill.

Details of the payment process for debit cards are still being worked out.

A tender was called by LTA yesterday for a consultancy study into this account-based ticketing system to gauge its feasibility.

The study is expected to start in the second quarter of this year.

"Should the account-based ticketing pilot be successful, Singapore would be one of the few cities in the world to adopt this fare payment system," said LTA chief executive Chew Men Leong.

"Commuters can look forward to having more choices for fare payment without the hassle of topping up their fare cards," he added.

In London, a similar payment system called Contactless has been implemented on buses since 2012, and on the train network two years later in 2014.

For such a system to be rolled out here, the software of fare gantries and card readers on buses have to be upgraded to accept credit and debit cards that have EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) chips. These are "contactless" as they do not have to be swiped like the usual bank cards.

Such cards are already available in the market, such as Visa's payWave and MasterCard's PayPass.

In London's Contactless system, commuters can track their journeys and fare history, and apply for refunds through a web account on the Transport for London website.

It is understood that LTA will also have a similar web portal, should its system take off.

LTA said a trial will be conducted in the fourth quarter of this year. Besides the tender for the consultancy, another will be held to appoint an "acquiring bank" to process payments made.

Public relations consultant Celina Lim, 27, said it would be convenient to use her credit card for train and bus rides.

"I don't have to top up my fare cards anymore. During the rush hours in the mornings, the queues at the top-up machines at the MRT station can be very long," she noted.

adrianl@sph.com.sg

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SINGAPORE - Some roads in the Bishan-Toa Payoh will be closed due to Chingay 2016 this Saturday (March 5).

The following roads will be affected at these timings:

1. 5.00pm to 5.45pm: The carriageway of Bishan Street 14 in the direction of Bishan Street 13 (between Bishan Street 15 and Bishan Street 13)

2. 5.20pm to 6.10pm: The carriageway of Bishan Street 13 in the direction of Bishan Street 12 (between Bishan Street 14 and Bishan Street 11)

3. 6.00pm to 10.00pm: The carriageway of Lorong 1A Toa Payoh in the direction of Lorong 2 Toa Payoh

4. 8.30pm to 10.30pm: The carriageway of Toa Payoh Central in the direction of Lorong 2 Toa Payoh

During the road closures, access will only be granted to police and emergency vehicles.

Parking restrictions along the peripheral roads will be strictly enforced. Vehicles found parking and causing obstruction will be towed.

Members of the public may contact the organiser at the hotline: 8492 1070 for further enquiries.

debwong@sph.com.sg

SINGAPORE - Bus services 134 and 150 run by SBS Transit will begin in the east from March 20.

Bus service 134 will run in a loop from Sims Place Bus Terminal to Marine Terrace - increasing commuter accessbility to Paya Labar MRT Station.

Bus service 150 will similarly run in a loop that from Eunos Bus Interchange to Marine Terrace, before going back via Changi Road and Jalan Turi.

According to a report by The Straits Times, bus service 76 will also be changed. It will now end at Eunos Bus Interchange instead of Yio Chu Kang Interchange.

prabukm@sph.com.sg

The press announcement for the new McLaren 570GT is filled with foreign words and phrases - things like "practical", "comfortable", luxurious" and "relaxing". It's quite confusing, but as car writers, it is our job to decipher the indecipherable. The 570GT, I discerned after a brief OED consultation, appears to be some sort of practical, comfortable, luxurious and relaxing McLaren. Imagine that.

This is the third model in the British carmaker's entry level Sport Series, joining the very serious 570S and the less-so 540C, and with its kinder, gentler demeanour, it brings along a clever new trick: a boot. The car eschews its stablemates' notchback roofline for a sweeping glass-topped fastback, and the result, with petite engine-lid vents and a modest fixed rear spoiler, is undeniably lovely.

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Ford, you tease. The carmaker has been stringing along diehard Bronco fans for more than a decade, most recently promising a revival of the SUV by 2020 and then dropping the subject completely. The company has remained tight-lipped about design, price point or launch date, forcing Bronco-lovers to fantasize about what the future holds. And boy, did they let their imaginations wander to a beautiful place.

The admins over at the fan forum Bronco6g.com dreamed up their own 2020 Bronco and shared renderings of the ideal sixth-generation SUV. Rather than presenting wildly contemporary elements and sleek curves, the designers went "retro-futuristic", using a modern body as a canvas while retaining a "tall, boxy, tough, no-frills design with a strong focus on utility and off-road capabilities."

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Let's face it: The Queen could use a new set of wheels. Now, there's nothing wrong with the Bentley State Limousine, which hasn't exactly led a hard life. But the car, created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the British throne, entered service way back in 2002. To put that in perspective, the car is older than Crocs, Gmail, The Da Vinci Code, and Top Gear with Jeremy, James and Richard.

Bentley's grand Mulsanne has been the State Limo's heir apparent since its 2010 debut, but although it certainly exceeded Royal specifications for bling, the car's rear-seat room was about a metre or so shy of "fit for a queen" status. Well, that changes with the debut of the Mulsanne Grand Limousine by Mulliner, unveiled today at the Geneva motor show. This privately commissioned (but eminently reproducible) car headlines a complete makeover of Bentley's flagship saloon.

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The Lamborghini Centenario is not a pretty car. It is dramatic, arresting, even frightening. But it is not pretty. The car company that a tractor-maker named Ferruccio founded in 1963 gave up building beautiful cars long ago, devoting itself instead to becoming the world's preeminent purveyor of rolling aggression. A fellow car writer, defending the antisocial appearance of the Centenario - and Lamborghini's current Weltanschauung - wrote in a Facebook comment: "Someone's gotta play the bad-boy card, and they play it well." That is the modern Lamborghini: the bad boy.

Unveiled this week at the Geneva motor show, the Centenario exists as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Ferruccio's birth. And despite its abject outlandishness, this is no token gesture: the Centenario is a full-on production model, albeit one destined for a very brief run.

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Knowing what we know about car writers, we can safely assume that at least four out of every five of them in attendance at the Geneva motor show this week planned - probably well in advance - to evoke a tired bit from This Is Spinal Tap in their coverage of the debut of Aston Martin DB11. And yet, as unimaginative as such a reference surely is (and it is), there is some truth to it. In creating its successor to the 13-year-old DB9, Aston Martin pushed, quite boldly, into new territory. The new DB is more sophisticated, more user-friendly, more capable, more comfortable and, though it hardly seems possible, more beautiful than the car it replaces. Aston's DB11 is, stated plainly, Geneva's Best in Show.

The DB11 is the first new Aston to leverage the company's budding relationship with Daimler - an agreement that eventually will beget a bespoke Aston-AMG V8 engine - and it does so with impressive finesse. That's a good thing, because this is an important car for Aston Martin - probably the most important model in its 103-year history.

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SINGAPORE - Certificate of Entitlement (COE) prices ended higher for the first round of bidding in March on Wednesday (March 9).

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) said in a statement that it received 7,864 bids at the end of the March bidding, of which 3,985 were successful.

COE premiums for Cat A - cars up to 1,600cc - went up from $43,000 to $45,000.

The prices for Cat B - cars above 1,600cc - rose to $47,604 from $46,970 in the latest bidding.

For Cat E which is the open category that can be used for any vehicle, COE prices increased from $45,009 to $48,002.

Motorcycle premiums increased from $6,353 to $6,503.

COE prices for goods vehicles and buses also went up to $48, 890 from $45,001.

ssandrea@sph.com.sg

Singapore's roads are about to be livened up as public buses will soon sport a new, green look by the middle of this year.

The Land Transport Authority announced the new bus colour in a statement on Friday (March 11). The colour 'lush green' had edged out the other choice of 'bright red' by a mere 144 votes in the public voting exercise that had ended Feb 5.

A total of 57,505 votes were cast during the month-long voting period.

The chosen colour represents environmental friendliness and symbolises growth, vitality, prosperity and progress, said the LTA.

Back in December last year, LTA had announced that it will be taking over SBS Transit's contracts for incoming buses worth S$164 million and will also buy 50 other existing buses from the bus operator for S$23 million under the new bus contracting model.

With the transition to this new contracting model, the Government will gradually own all public buses.

ssandrea@sph.com.sg

I was behind the wheel of a £200,000 Aston Martin Vanquish Volante, careening across a sheet of ice, when I realised my ice-driving instructor was out of his mind.

Moments before, I'd explained to Ramana Lagemann, a professional rally driver, that I had no business manoeuvring a 568-horsepower sports car on asphalt, let alone slick ice. After all, at home in Los Angeles, I tool around town in a 2007 RAV4, my 9-year-old daughter buckled into the back seat, my foot hovering over the brake pedal. And that's on a macadam road without so much as a puddle.

But as we fishtailed across the ice and our demise seemed all but certain, Lagemann peered at me through grey Ray-Bans and said, with eerie calm, "Pick up the speed".

Read the full article here.

TopGear.com's Jason Barlow recently had the opportunity to jet off to Portugal to claim some seat time in the new Mercedes-Benz E-Class. As ever, the German carmaker's bread-and-butter saloon aims to be many things to many drivers - from beige-painted workhorses for Stuttgart taxi drivers to leather-lined Q-ships for American mover/shaker types.

But beyond its hedonistic delights, cutting-edge safety features and clever powertrain options, the new E packs one altogether stunning bit of tech-wizardry: an driverless-operation system called Drive Pilot.

Writes Barlow: "[The system] uses a stereo camera, radar sensors and a modestly-sized box of tricks secreted in the rear wing to drive the car autonomously - accelerating, braking, changing lanes and even coming to a complete halt without any input from the driver."

This feature was sophisticated enough to earn the new E-Class an autonomous testing licence in the US state of Nevada - the first for a standard-production car. And it's a technology that will figure prominently in Mercedes' model strategy during the next few years.

Read the full article here.

We write a lot about autonomous vehicles, and have explored the special sensors, interfaces, communication systems, and computing power that will be integral to their inevitable deployment. We hadn't, until now, thought much about the tyres. But then, we don't work for Goodyear.

"We aren't trying to predict the future, but we're looking to the future of mobility and connectivity," says Goodyear's Keith Price, spokesperson for the company's R&D arm. At last week's Geneva motor show, the tyre and rubber company unveiled two new concepts specifically designed for autonomous vehicles.

The first, called the Eagle-360, literally reinvents the wheel (a cliche we imagine is banned company-wide) with a stunning spherical design.

The advantages of ball-shaped tyres are legion. Using them, an autonomous vehicle could move in any direction at any angle at any time, spinning the vehicle in place to turn around, making completely parallel lane changes, or crab-rolling sideways to parallel park in a tiny space after dropping its passengers.

These manoeuvres are impossible to execute using a human/steering-wheel interface (which requires forward momentum to execute a turn), but with a robot in charge of a spherical tyre, just about anything is possible.

Read the full article here.

PRIVATE-CAR hire drivers operating under Uber and GrabCar may soon be required to have a vocational licence, under regulations expected to be announced next month.

A proposed training programme, at least 10 hours long - shorter than the 60-hour taxi driver vocational licence (TDVL) course - is being considered by authorities for these private chauffeurs, sources said.

The licensing requirement, which follows a review that started in October, is expected to be announced by the Ministry of Transport next month, during the Budget debate.

There will be a "phase-in" period to allow drivers time to go for the vocational course, said industry sources, who requested anonymity. It is estimated that there are tens of thousands of private-car hire drivers in Singapore.

Course credits attained during the proposed vocational training could also be used for the TDVL, should the drivers want to become cabbies.

Besides vocational licensing, sources said authorities are also mulling over clearer demarcation of cars being used to pick up passengers. This could be through decals pasted on these vehicles to identify them.

Asked about the upcoming regulations, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) said only that "more details will be made known in the coming weeks".

With a regulatory framework, Singapore will join countries such as the Philippines and Australia in making efforts to legalise an industry that has come under heat for allegedly competing unfairly with taxis.

Head of Grab Singapore, Lim Kell Jay, said vocational licensing can serve as an "added assurance" to commuters that drivers and trips are of standard. He added that the company does its own screening, such as background checks and in-person registration.

Uber's general manager in Singapore, Warren Tseng, said he was "hopeful of a positive outcome" to the review, to ensure drivers could continue to have flexible work opportunities and commuters, reliable transportation options.

Private-car hire driver James Koh, 53, said if vocational licences become a requirement, part-timers may find it a hassle and stop driving.

"We have been operating for so long without problems, I find it strange that we need to have a licence now," he added.

National University of Singapore transport researcher Lee Der Horng, however, said regulations benefit private-car hire services by legalising them.

adrianl@sph.com.sg

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"It's superb," writes TopGear.com's Ollie Marriage. "Honestly, you just don't need more."

At present, there are 16 distinct models in the Porsche 911 range - that's 16 different cars all wearing '911' on the rear end, ranging from the standard Carrera to the track-ready GT3 RS. Which one is best? Well, conventional wisdom might suggest that power and price would be good indicators, bigger being better. But that may not be the case. "Historically, the entry-level 911 tends to be the sweetest car in the range," writes TopGear.com's Ollie Marriage. And after an enthusiastic stint in a base-spec Carrera with a traditional manual gearbox, Ollie is ready to proclaim an unlikely winner. "It's superb. Honestly, you just don't need more."

On the switch to a turbocharged engine for the Carrera:

"It's mostly the noise rather than the power delivery that has suffered. It's softer in tone now, more muffled, has lost the tingle, zap and yowl. It's interesting though. Around town it still has the low-rev chunter that gives you hope of more to come, but as you go faster you leave the noise behind."

On the seven-speed manual transmission:

"It's fantastic, so nice to use with a lovely short shift, lovely clutch weighting, lovely action. It's just lovely. I know almost everyone opts for PDK [automatic] these days, but honestly this new seven-speed manual is so good-natured and easygoing that it's no hassle at all, no matter how sticky the traffic. It also gives you a closer personal relationship with the engine. Sounds daft, but it's something which I'm sure makes me feel better disposed to this car."

On the ride and handling:

"This car just feels so fabulously useable, so effortlessly rapid.

Read the full article here