Comment by wraptile
3 days ago
I'd take Bangkok over Singapore any time of the day/month/year. There's still a bit of chaos in Bangkok in 2025 but once you spend a few days there and learn how to avoid peak traffic hours and areas it's incredibly charming and charistmatic city with loads of activities and opportunities for all classes of people. Singapore while clean is incredibly dull and characterless unless you're a billionaire.
"Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this. Also, a very high percent of the time, the Icon Siam area is extremely congested (even on weekends). Yes, you can avoid living in or going to that area, but there are also very few nice areas in Bangkok in general.
Most don't have the luxury of the flexibility to avoid certain areas and/or certain peak travel times (which in BKK are many throughout the day)
> "Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this
you can absolutely do this. Once you learn how to live there and design your own routes with motorbike taxis, sky train etc you do save a lot of time. It's still quite bad but it's 20 minutes vs 2 hours sort of better.
Every time I tried taking a motorbike taxi, they charged me probably three times more than a local to just travel maybe 1km, not to mention Bangkok has one of the deadliest roads in the world, if not the deadliest. I have explored pretty much all of Bangkok and I don't think the MRT and BTS are as convenient as some people make it out to be. It is built as it is in any other city where it's very concentrated around the city centre but anything right outside of that is terrible.
Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.
Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.
This comment is proof that the parent commenter has never actually lived in either city.
After a while, a city's 'character', 'charm', and 'charisma' all become annoyances. People live, work, go to school, file taxes, use transport, not just visit tourist attractions. Singapore's quality and efficiency of administration is light-years beyond any other country, perhaps bar Switzerland. 6.1 million people live in Singapore; they're not all multimillionaires.
It's hard to put into words how unsafe Singapore makes me feel.
No, literally, it's hard to put it into words. I feel that if I criticize the country, the govt might take revenge the next time I visit. (See also: Bald JD Vance)
Metrics aren't everything. Singapore might be on paper a great place to live, but it could never be a home.
I agree it's hard to explain why Singapore is so dull. I go there every year or so as that's where the closest Lithuanian embassy is and the entire country feels like a shopping mall.
It's a great example how "on paper" metrics don't match reality but it's hardly surprising given that manipulating paper is the entire function of the country.
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Oh, for goodness' sake, drop the melodrama and hyperbole. I take it you haven't lived in the country either.
Singapore is not North Korea, the PRC, or any of the Gulf countries, where people just get disappeared (or sawn into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase) for 'criticising the government' or 'criticising the country'.
I am Singaporean.
I can absolutely call the ruling People's Action Party a bunch of ivory tower-dwelling bureaucrats who have lost touch with the issues of the populace, and are mostly far cry from Lee Kuan Yew's days. I can say that Ms Josephine Teo really needs to keep her mouth shut, and that Mr Ng Chee Meng, MP for Jalan Kayu, didn't deserve to win his constituency one jot. I can say the ruling party regularly gerrymander the districts so they keep winning, even though they deny it. I can say they stifle the development of creative pursuits and the arts with their heavy-handed censorship. I can say they have their vices backwards by being extremely light on drink-driving, but simultaneously extremely harsh on cannabis, which smells horrible but isn't a big problem in terms of addiction or withdrawal.
I can say they are strongly influenced by Anglospheric right-wing Christian evangelism, and they need to root it out before it settles too deep into the country's psyche. I can say they are trying to build a cult of personality of Lee Kuan Yew, who has been dead for 10 years; it's time the country, the government, and the ruling party built on his legacy and moved forward instead of circling around him and his memory.
If you want more criticism, how about actually watching the Singapore Parliament, and deciding for yourself?
Oh, and if you ever decide to drop by, leave the hard drugs at home (including weed), if you want to leave with your head on its neck.
As for metrics: Singapore is both on paper and in reality a pretty good place to live, if you can stand the humidity and heat (frankly, that's the only truly oppressive thing about the place, how ruddy hot it gets). Why do you think people still emigrate to it, from lower-income countries, and from the West?
And finally, 'bald JD Vance', I don't understand how US politics is related to Singapore. They are countries hemispheres apart. One occupies a full third of a continent and has a population of 350 million. The other is a tiny island city-state of 6 million.
The politics of the US have also degraded to something worse than sports rivalries and the discourse is generally of extremely poor quality; it is only a reflection of the competence (or lack thereof) of its leadership and the majority of its people.
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