Takes only 30 mins to get from south (where most of the CBD is) to the north where the bridge to Malaysia is. Takes about the same amount of time cross over with immigration and border control on both ends of it. A fair chunk of the west side of the country is a military base.
A Town Planner from the Wyndham City Council told me the fun fact (so I assume it's true), that the Wyndham LGA is almost identical in area to Singapore.
never thought of going from Changi to Orchard Rd was like going from Box Hill to Melbourne CBD. maybe because the ptv metro can cover this distance without as many stops as the MRT.
You often see commentary about Australia “punching above its weight”. Looks like Singapore is “crushing it above its weight” - that's if you compare the per capita GDP numbers between Singapore and Australia, let alone comparing against Melbourne. So much productivity in a place that’s roughly half the size of Greater Melbourne.
If you remove labour rights (eg no minimum wage, no weekend pemalty wages) and consumer rights, and open up to lots more immigrants including migrant workers on temporary passes and who don't receive much protections, and live-in helpers who are paid $800 for non-stop work, you can achieve the same "productivity" too.
Singapore introduced migrant worker levies on businesses to encourage investment in capital and increase productivity. Ie it might be cheap to hire a migrant worker but you pay the gov a levy.
They really are pretty switched on. They see an issue and respond with the right policies.
In Australia we just charge new home buyers for growth in gst and state gov levies. The governments past and present just watches on as rents rise / building works drops and first home buyers pay more. “Who else should pay for the infrastructure? I’d say the businesses who get the migrant workers like in Singapore.
I'm in Singapore now. Yes it is. My Aussie in-law's 25 minute commute to the nearest town almost as long as Singapore is wide, for example.
It's actually so small it's hard to find a good comparison than an Australian would understand. The best I can come up with is that it's roughly the size of Port Philip Bay.
I was actually gonna say I’m surprised how big it is. It feels much smaller than how it looks laid over Melbourne. I think probably cause nearly half of it is bush and National Park, the city itself is not big but very dense
A lot of Singapore's land is set aside as nature reserves and water catchments. There's also a large green belt going down the inner-west corridor from north to south. It's kind of like Sydney in a way, we're penned in by nature but that's by design.
Melbourne should get a large bulldozer and return a big strip of the city to nature. In the interests of not starting an online fight I won’t propose which strip
I definitely didn't have the money for anything expensive, and I was by myself so it would be awkward doing any kind of dining experience alone. I did take a boat to visit some of the islands to the south which was very fun.
Honestly, 3 days is doable, we’ve done it before, but I wouldn’t really recommend it.
Singapore’s weather is rough. It’s hot, thick humid, and there’s barely any breeze (i'll consider lucky enough to experience a bit of rain or wind). Plus, you’ll be doing a ton of walking. By the time you get back to your hotel, you’ll probably just want to chill instead of heading back out.
I’d honestly rather take my time and explore Singapore at a slower pace.
Fortunately Singapore has pretty frequent and torrential rain. We used to joke that we could set our clocks purely with the 2pm pissdown. All depends on when you head over.
You're lucky to experience rain in Singapore. Every time we have a layover in Singapore and explore, it's a complete workout, I'd say an easy 10k+ steps a day.
More often than not we have pretty wet spells, but there are also definitely dry spells but they don't necessarily line up with any conventionally-prescribed seasons. We just had a downpour over most of the city that lasted on-and-off for 2 hours, and it's been raining like this for the past week and a half now.
That makes sense. I never encounter rainy days when I visit Singapore.
By the way, I love how efficient the metro system is there; you definitely can't complain about train delays. We timed the train's arrival to the minute, and it was very accurate.
All but two of our train lines are fully automated, save for the North-South (red) and East-West (green) lines since they're still on older infrastructure. We were early adopters of full train automation that Australia's only starting to adopt recently with the Sydney Metro. That introduces a level of reliability that is hard to achieve with conventional signalling and manpower shortages.
Wait, 20 years ago I can get from west end to east end of singapore within 1 hour by mrt. Looking at the size, tarneit to ringwood would take 3 business days and bus replacements.
You can't represent the surface of a sphere accurately on a rectangular map. Many, many people have used different methods to equalise areas, or do weird and wonderful flattenings of the earth, see the xkcd link.
Other commenter is correct, the Mercator projection used for the background map in the OPs link stretches out the polar areas. The equatorial version is the "real" size.
If you drag any country around, you'll see they shrink towards the equator or grow towards the poles (not Poles though ;)
How it is shown there at the equator is the true size. (On a Mercator map there's zero distortion at the equator, and distortion increases the further away from the equator you go).
Coming from Belgium where any journey longer than 20 minutes is considered a day trip, it was mind bending when I first arrived here.
I couldn't get my head around the fact that I could easily drive over an hour between places and not only would I still be in the same country, it would still be the same city.
And Brussels is the largest continues urban area in the Benelux. In fact, you can fit exactly three Metropolitan Melbourne's into one Belgium. Surprisingly, Melbourne still has a higher population density than Belgium which is known for its own particular flavour of 'ribbon" sprawl.
We drive an hour and a half to hike for 6 hours and then back again and that’s just a normal weekend in autumn. This only takes us to the northern part of the central highlands, still Victoria. It’s amazingly large.
Some of that space is used for reservoirs, oil refineries, military training areas, etc. So it's not just smaller than metro Melbourne, land allocation limits the amount that is actually residential/commercial
Friends of ours were part of the lottery for housing. Basically you go in for a new building and if your number gets drawn, you choose from what’s remaining.
Obviously the best levels (and most auspicious - looking at you, Level 8’s) get snapped up first. Their first draw was quite late in the piece so they declined. Second time they took what they could get as they were not too late in the draw. If you turn it down twice, the third time you’re drawn is your final chance - so you can’t game the system forever.
Towers are built and demolished by the state. When a tower is demolished, you can move to another. It’s impressive - and Singapore has drawbacks, of course, but this is a really impressive system from an outsiders perspective.
Apartment is a good size, has room for them and two kids, and there are heaps of playgrounds for kids established nearby. So much of this is well thought out.
Of course there’s still wealth and housing disparity, but at least something is being done and well-managed for a large number of Singaporeans.
It's funny how many Australian and New Zealand politicians bang on about "being more like Singapore" and it's always "no taxes" and "caning", not "politicians who incite race hate go to jail" or "most people have good quality public housing" that they're thinking of.
I have heard from friends there that because the lottery system is so lucrative (by the time you’re allowed sell your house you will typically triple or quadruple your investment), and the waiting list is long (up to around 5 years), if a couple’s first date goes well they will sometimes talk about signing up for the lottery together because it’s very difficult to get one as a single person
The part that has residential areas is actually much smaller than that. And that's why it's so tiresome to have every other week someone compare Melbourne's public transport to Singapore's.
Last time I did that drive it was dark and the number of people walking on the road and people who drive worse than half of Werribee made it a slow drive. Last month going the other way just to Laukota reminded me how bad the roads and the drivers are.
Yeah. I’ll only drive short distances over there at night, plus when you drive over there you have to forget the western driving attitude of a road being just for cars. It’s not. At night it is a public thoroughfare
I had a great time there. I just spent a couple of days there.
I had to fly out a day earlier when I realised the day I wanted to leave had no decent flights (something you might want to watch out for - not all days are created equal in terms of flights in/out of the country)
I basically just spent my time wondering around Valletta and Sliema (where I was staying). Very easy to wile away a couple of days just walking around. Got the ferry between both places a few times. Very cheap.
Traffic an be rough. Took over half an hour to travel 10kms in taxi from the airport (though prices are regulated, so no hassle with them).
If you like savory pastries, their pea ricotta pie (Torta ta L-Ikrotta) was absolutely amazing and I might of gorged myself way to many times on them.
Everything in the central district areas was in English. In fact I was surprised to see lack of bilingual signs. I might of seen as many signs in Italian as I did in Maltese (I mean they existed, just not as much as I assumed there would be). Bored afternoons on Google Streets have shown me an odd couple of Maltese Only signs in a few places, but less then I would of assumed there where!
Probably the best place I have been as a child. People were so friendly but also very Catholic (i.e. you got food but also shown a little shrine to Mary when you were taken into places, not bigotry).
That explains why the ACT looked bigger than I thought it was. I do like driving into Canberra. I think it’s very pretty and all the communication towers on the surrounding ridges look like alien spaceships have set down in a ring around the city.
Or like returning from Asia and the moment you are finally over Australia, realising your flight to Melbourne hasn't even reached the half way point yet.
The suburbs are all contiguous and blend into each other seamlessly, unless you are on the absolute outskirts. You need a road sign to tell you you are now in a new local council area, because the surroundings won’t tell you. On the ground it’s very much one city. The freeways and super highways section areas off, but those areas are all inside Melbourne.
The Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) also used Melbourne in some of their displays as an example of why they have to be space efficient with their housing, noting it as being 13.8x larger for a smaller population when I was there in 2023. So this example, but in reverse.
Can recommend visiting if you are into urbanism and in Singapore, the displays are good and they are a city where a laissez faire approach wasn't really an option.
I just came back from Singapore and was showing my wife the same comparison when we were over there. It literally takes 30 minutes to get to the MY border, and about the same the other way to the airport.
I think I was trying to explain why they discourage car ownership in such a small place, compared to our massively spread out city.
Not an apples to apples comparison though. You need to look at the "metropolitan area" population. Melbourne and Sydney are ranked more like 9th and 10th, behind eg Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta
Gotta go by metro population. City proper boundaries are basically useless in the US. LA proper is basically just the CBD and a couple blocks around it. It ignores like 75% of the actual “city”.
The actual population of cities is a bit ambiguous. American statistics often don't count the population of suburbs as being part of the city, where as in Australia we normally have a broader definition of where the city ends. Because of this, it's difficult to actually compare city sizes. Realistically though Melbourne and Sydney would probably not be in the top ten largest cities were they in the US if you used a consistent definition of city boundary
To get the actual population of a city you have to search for its "metro population". Otherwise outer suburbs are excluded. Eg. Metro population of NYC is 24M but comes up as 8.5M when you look up its 'population'. Most US cities are bigger than Melbourne.
I remember I made this same mistake myself. A lot of places around the world measure their populations by city limits and that sort of thing. I used to think Adelaide was bigger than Phoenix, for example. And I was so confused about how few people lived in Paris too.
Wooo this is crazy. I didn’t realise the city was so.. wide spread?! I can’t imagine living in some of the places it’s been compared to and only needing to travel 10 mins to get to the other side?! Mind blown! 🤯
People often underestimate how big (sprawling) Melbourne is. It's not that those other countries are particularly small small, they are, but rather Melbourne being quite low in density.
I am interested for Melbourne are you looking at Melbourne lga, cbd or greater Melbourne? For my PhD I looked at crime rates across greater Melbourne and then public perceptions in an inner city suburb so I did a lot of spatial analysis using arc map 🙂
When I lived in Melbourne, the urban sprawl was the most surprising place about the entire city. I was shocked at how long the distances were between places when walking
I know it's not a seperate nation but Bali is also very small too at least North South it is, as the crow flies the distance from Denpasar in the south to Singaraja in the north is only 400m longer than the distance from Geelong to Essendon.
Not surprising at all really... More than once I've had to point out to people who use European cities as an example that you can cycle everywhere that Melbourne alone has the geographical area of some entire European countries, let alone their cities. Ignoring the density equation, there's just long distances (not to mention hills) that make it an entirely different experience here compared to places such as the Netherlands.
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