Built to pass through.

Singapore's infrastructure is very good at moving people. It was never asked to do anything else, and it doesn't.

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There is a moment that happens to me most days and I suspect it happens to you. I am walking somewhere with someone. We are talking. Someone comes the other way, and without discussing it we fall into single file. One of us keeps talking to the back of the other's head, or the sentence just stops. Ten seconds later we re-form, pick up roughly where we were, and neither of us mentions it.

It is such a small thing that it feels absurd to complain about. That is exactly why I want to start there. Nobody is going to write to the papers about a broken sentence. But it happens to everyone, several times a walk, every day, across an entire island, and it is not weather or bad luck. It is a width.

Most people, most of the time, are not walking alone. When researchers actually counted, on a weekday square it was 55 percent in company and on a Saturday street it was 70. And people in company walk side by side for a reason: it is the only arrangement in which you can talk to someone without turning your back on them. They will even walk slower to keep it. That formation is not a preference. It is what walking with another person is.

A footpath narrow enough to break it is not a footpath that is slightly too small. It is a footpath that has quietly decided walking is something you do alone.

Once you notice the width you start noticing everything else.

You notice that the grass beside the path is immaculate, and that it is immaculate because nobody has ever set foot on it. You notice that there is often more grass than path. You notice that when you accidentally drift onto the cycling lane there is no graceful way back, because someone has put a planting strip between you and the pavement, and so you either keep going where you shouldn't or you step through the shrubs like an idiot.

You notice that you can walk twenty minutes through a dense neighbourhood, past thousands of homes, and pass nowhere you could sit down that isn't a bus stop.

You notice a hardcourt with floodlights, empty at four in the afternoon, ringed by mown turf, sitting between an MRT station and a shopping mall, in a town of a quarter of a million people. You notice the mall has its back to it. Starbucks, a food court, a supermarket, thirty metres away, all of it facing inward into air conditioning. Not one door opens onto the field.

The space is not missing. It is right there. It has simply never been asked to do anything.

I lived in Europe for a while, and I keep going back to one square in Brussels. It is not famous and it is not beautiful. There is graffiti on one wall and weeds in the cobbles and the grass is worn down to dirt in places.

What it has is a fountain that comes on during the day, some shallow wide steps, two curved concrete walls facing inward, a sand pit with play equipment, and a hard court, all strung together in a chain about the size of one of our fields. Children are in the water. Their parents are on the steps because that is where you can watch the water from. Teenagers have the court. Old people sit on the walls. Nobody organised any of this.

I met people there. Strangers. I joined things I had not been invited to, which is a sentence I cannot say about anywhere in Singapore that isn't licensed, ticketed, or organised by a committee.

And here is the part I did not understand until recently. The official description of that park says the planting is deliberately kept minimal, because usage is so high. They took out greenery because too many people were using the place.

Our turf is perfect because it is empty. Theirs is worn because it isn't. That is not a difference in money, or climate, or culture. It is a difference in what we think the grass is for.

I want to be fair about how we got here, because the lazy version of this argument is that somebody wasn't thinking, and that isn't true.

Singapore's network was built by people solving a real problem with real constraints: get several million people to work, quickly, reliably, out of the sun and the rain, on very little land. Measured against that, it is one of the best in the world. The covered linkway is a genuinely excellent object. The trains run. The paths connect.

The issue is not that we failed at the objective. It is that only one objective was ever set. We optimised entirely for the journeys people have to make, and never for the ones they would make if the place gave them a reason. Those are the walks that turn into conversations, and the conversations that turn into knowing your neighbours, and that is not a soft outcome. Social connection is one of the strongest things we know of for how a life goes.

So we built somewhere very efficient to pass through, and then wondered why nobody stops.

I am not asking for a masterplan and I am not asking anyone to knock anything down. Two things.

Enough width to walk beside someone. Our own design guide already says two people walking side by side with room for a third to pass needs two metres. It applies that on overhead bridges. On the ground, next to a cycling path, the number drops to one and a half. Two adults are 1.22 metres of shoulder before anyone has made room for anything. Make the ground match the bridge.

Somewhere to stop. Not everywhere. But when there is already a mown field between a station and a mall, with shade trees around the edge and thousands of people crossing it daily, something should be built on the line they already walk. Shallow steps. A low wall you can sit on from either side. Water children can get into. It costs very little and it does not need land we do not have, because the land is already there, cut and watered every week.

None of this is about Europe being better. Half of Europe scores worse than we do on nearly every measure of how life is going, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

It is about a narrower thing. We are extremely good at building the parts of a city you move through, and we have barely tried to build the parts you stay in. We have the land, sitting in plain sight under cut grass. We have the money, a billion of it committed to friendlier streets. We have the standards, and in at least one place we have already written down the right number and then declined to use it.

What is missing is the decision that a street is somewhere people are, and not just somewhere they are on their way through.