MARCH 22 — I know I’ve mentioned this before but I really can’t afford to buy a car right now. And that’s a problem because Singapore’s once-lauded public transport system seems to have come unstuck.

There has been more than enough noise online the last few months about MRT disruptions with thousands of commuters stuck, stranded or just frustrated and an articulate few resorting to hilarious (and caustic) tweets using the #smrtmovies (do check it out).

A couple of gems include: Jurassic Parts and The Fault In Our Tracks (which is pretty spot on).

So, I can’t afford a car and the public transport is in need of an overhaul; what are my options?

We all know about the trauma of flagging a taxi in this country which leaves working remotely and never leaving my block or finding a more affordable means of liberating myself from public transport.

One word — motorbike. It’s a word I haven’t mentioned to my mother.

But it would seem she has little to worry about, for now.

Motorcyclists in Taipei... see, even men ride smaller scooters. – Picture by AFP

My single attempt at procuring the necessary class 2B licence was not encouraging. I turned up at the circuit in the thickest pair of jeans I own, a long sleeved sweater over a T-shirt and padded up with every conceivable joint guard.

Helmet on, visor down, I could just see the camera pan out like the opening credits of one of those movie classics: Top Gun or Easy Rider.

Except the ride was anything but easy. I clambered on top of the bike, listened intently to the instructions about the clutch, brake and bike domination – hit the gas and promptly landed on my ass.

Which I suppose is fine – one is supposed to bounce right back up when learning. This I did and then I leaned over to pick up the motorbike I had been given and failed. Repeatedly.

I must have spent about 100 minutes of that 120-minute lesson in various stages of attempting to prop up my bike. And part of the final test is this very exercise: lifting the bike back up without assistance.

Now I know a lot of this is down to my innate lack of co-ordination but I’d also like to point out that this is a 100 kilo machine (a 124cc Honda CG 125). And while I despise talk of a weaker sex — physically at least lifting this mass of metal isn’t easy for someone half its weight.

Of course I know there are women who have very easily and capably secured their motorbike licences but the insistence that everyone who receives a bike licence in the city learn on 120cc bikes puts most Singaporean women at a disadvantage.

An article in a local paper states that women, on average, spend approximately 47 hours training before getting their class 2B licences while men train for just 10 hours to receive the same licence.

Overall the figures I found for bike usage are even more stark, according to one statistic I found online, Singapore had 658,000 male motorbike licence holders to 21,000 females holding an equivalent licence.

This is somewhat absurd. It’s really a gaping hole in policy and what it means is that thousands of women are being deprived of equal access to low-cost mobility.

Because it’s not that women don’t want to ride bikes — in most of Asia, anyone can see the situation is quite the opposite. If you go to Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, the subcontinent, scooters are almost the mainstay of female mobility.

They’ve given millions of women and girls the ability to move around without the control of a husband a father.

All Singapore needs to do to alter its bike gender imbalance is introduce a light motorbike or scooter licence category (which exists in several countries). This would give women like me, who struggle to control a full-sized bike, a more accessible option.

At the moment even if my intention is to ride a moped I must secure a license for a 200cc bike, and that doesn’t make much sense. 

I suspect a lot of the resistance to this easy fix comes from a fear of having our city swarmed by hordes of motorbikes. To our policy makers, streets infested with girls on bikes would look terrifyingly Third World.

But the truth is that if the city can’t offer a working taxi system, or reliable public transport then you need to give people options and there’s no excuse for giving women fewer options than men.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.