Speeding

Singapore fixes maximum speeds twice over, in two instruments that do different jobs. One set of rules attaches a maximum speed to the vehicle itself — to its class, and in places to its configuration, whatever road it happens to be on. A separate notification fixes the limit on the road, in general and then road by road through its own schedules, and it is the limit the signs carry. A driver is subject to both at once, and the lower of the two is the one that binds in practice.

Exceeding either is an offence, but not the same offence. The Act creates them in different subsections, and that is where the consequences part company. The demerit points are identical band for band, because the points register prices both offences from the same table of excess speeds. The disposal route is not identical at all: the road limit offence is named in the composition rules and can be settled without a court; the vehicle-class offence appears nowhere in them and can only be disposed of by a court.

The temptation is to present that as one ladder with a note attached, because the points columns look the same. This site does not, and the reason is that the identical columns are the most misleading thing on the page unless the two ladders stay physically apart. A reader who has been told the points are the same will assume everything else is too. The points being equal is a fact about the points register. It is not evidence that the offences are equivalent, and here it is evidence of nothing at all about how the matter will be disposed of.

What the ladders do and do not tell you

The bands are stated as an excess over the applicable limit, not as absolute speeds, so the same excess carries the same points whether the limit was a school zone or an expressway. Points are awarded on conviction and also on the payment of a composition, so the compoundable route does not avoid them. And the ladders say nothing about money: neither speeding subsection states a penalty of its own, so the fine on conviction comes from the Act’s general penalty, and the composition ceiling is derived from that.

Zone offences sit on top of this rather than beside it. Where the offence was committed in a school zone, a silver zone or a street demarcated as a Friendly Street, the points register allows an uplift on top of the ordinary award — for an enumerated subset of its scheduled offences, not for all of them, and in permissive rather than mandatory terms. That distinction is set out on the demerit points page, together with the question it leaves open.