All photos by Isaiah Chua for RICE Media unless stated otherwise.
When a neighbourhood in Indonesia set out to become “the Singapore of Medan” they built their own Merlion, Fountain of Wealth, and the arches of Fullerton Hotel.
Oddly enough, they also put up their own Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantry—white and blue, arching over a busy road.
It’s a testament to how ERP gantries have become an indelible part of The Singapore Experience. That slow dread as your car hurtles toward the arch. The double beep. Money vanishing in the name of managing traffic congestion. A price to pay for being on the wrong road at the wrong time.
Singapore’s road toll system isn’t going anywhere. Most drivers have accepted it as the cost of vehicle ownership. But what if road pricing didn’t need gantries, cash cards, or clunky in-vehicle units?
What if it were just an app?
A Different Vision for ERP
That’s the question Open Government Products (OGP)—a team under GovTech that builds tech for the public good—has been exploring.
ERP was first introduced on April 1, 1998 (unfortunately, not an April Fools’ joke). The goal was to reduce congestion by levying tolls during peak hours in busy areas like the CBD.
Then, in 2014, the government announced that it would be replacing the ERP system. This finally came to fruition in November 2023, when the Land Transport Authority (LTA) began its rollout of ERP 2.0.
Why a new version? ERP 1.0 was approaching the end of its shelf life, the government had said back in 2014. There’s only so much upgrading you can carry out on tech built in the 90s before it becomes obsolete. With ERP 2.0 making use of satellite technology and On-Board Units (OBUs) installed in vehicles, the old gantries will eventually be phased out.
The new tech is also supposed to allow for more flexible charging methods like distance-based pricing, though the Land Transport Authority (LTA) hasn’t confirmed if or when such changes will be implemented.
Despite the improvements under ERP 2.0, the clunky OBUs have been a source of frustration for some motorists.
ERP 2.0 has taken nearly a decade to reach our vehicles. And in that time, technology has leapfrogged ahead. Which begs the question: Is there a better way?
Enter ERP X
Christabel Png, formerly a senior product designer at OGP, didn’t think the issue was just the hardware. To her, the problem was the approach.
“It was purely from a user’s perspective that we looked at the tech behind ERP 2.0,” the 32-year-old says.
“It was a project that took 10 years to build, and half a billion dollars to execute. We said, ‘Tech shouldn’t be built like this today.’”
And so, Christabel and several of her OGP colleagues came up with an alternative: ERP X.
As drivers themselves, Christabel and her colleagues understood the daily friction points of ERP 2.0. And as domain experts across design, tech, and policy, they wanted to challenge themselves to make a better version.
“Requiring stored-value cards in a cashless era is outdated,” Christabel explains.
“My dad’s always forgetting to top up his cash card. He’s accumulated more than a thousand dollars in fines. In that sense, you’re punishing people for bad usability, which shouldn’t be the case.”
The team envisioned something flexible and invisible. No gantries. No stored-value cards. Just an easy, one-time setup, and fully automated payments.
ERP X was born in January 2024 during OGP’s annual hackathon, ‘Hack for Public Good’. The project had a small team—as the designer, Christabel worked alongside three engineers, a project manager, and a policy strategist—and they worked fast.
Just like a lean startup, they were building, testing, and iterating all at once. Within a month, they had a working prototype. By the third, they had a refined version and a pilot programme.
The concept is simple. Traffic cameras equipped with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) scan passing vehicles. Once your license plate is recognised, your linked debit or credit card is charged automatically. You get a notification within three seconds, with a breakdown of your daily and monthly spend.
Christabel says this visibility is key.
“The whole point of the charges is to discourage people from driving into congested areas. But when I did the research, I found that most people don’t even know how much they’re spending on ERP. So the essence of it isn’t really being achieved.”
With ERP X, people actually see how much they’re spending on ERP. And, according to Christabel, feedback from users so far has been that they love the automation. No Cash Cards, no top-ups to worry about, and no gantries.
Fighting for Change from Within
Improved user experience aside, ERP X isn’t just a tech demo. It’s also a case study in working differently within a system designed to resist disruption.
Christabel explains that government projects typically follow a waterfall development model, which is a rigid, top-down process. Senior policy teams set the goals. Technical staff and consultants flesh out the specifications. Procurement takes over. By the time the project reaches the hands of designers and developers, everything is locked in.
“In that traditional model, by the time it gets passed down to someone like the designer, the researcher, or the engineer who builds the system, it’s too late,” says Christabel. “The scope is set. Costs are fixed. So it’s hard to change the plan downstream.
In contrast, ERP X was designed in tight feedback loops. “I’d spend one week doing research, sitting in cars with strangers, testing the app,” she recalls. “The next week, I’d be designing the next version. Engineers would start building in parallel based on what I had validated and what was still evolving.”
To design and build systems well, you need multiple rounds of iteration, she explains. It’s all about understanding your users—how they feel, how they think, and what they need—and designing something that nudges them to behave in the way you want them to.
As Christabel recounts all the work she and her colleagues did, I can’t help thinking: Seems like an awful lot of work for a project that might not see the light of day. After all, while they were knee-deep in this passion project, ERP 2.0 was already being rolled out to more and more vehicles.
The team was just focused on doing their best, Christabel tells me with a wry laugh. There wasn’t any use worrying about the fate of their project.
“I was very much like, let’s just show what can be done, and ultimately, good work will live on in some capacity, whether it gets implemented now or in the future. And the fact that we did it means it’s no longer hypothetical.”
The project was also special to Christabel because it was the last thing she worked on before she left OGP last July. She’s now pursuing a master’s degree in Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London.
“My six years in government were full of problem-solving. Everything revolved around efficiency and optimisation. My current practice reveals what systems often miss: the invisible, the intuitive, and the emotional,” she explains.
Despite her departure, though, the project lives on.
In fact, OGP and LTA are now working on it together. They recently launched trial cameras in the Bras Basah area, and are on the hunt for members of the public to be part of their pilot programme.
Amelia Fong, Senior Manager of Policy & Transformation at OGP tells RICE: “We’re in the early stages of figuring out how this technology can be used effectively to improve road and vehicle usage operations, including enforcement.”
It’s a bit of a delicate dance—challenging old ways of doing things, while collaborating with the agencies that built them.
The Value of Trying
Despite offering a more seamless experience, ERP X won’t replace ERP 2.0—at least not anytime soon. As of early 2025, more than 430,000 OBUs have been installed.
That reality can be disheartening. What’s the point of building something better if you know it might never reach the masses?
But that’s not how OGP sees it.
“We see potential in this technology,” Amelia says. “We’re looking to test out different ideas and use cases across the whole of government… Feedback from these explorations will help us better understand where deploying such tech would be most impactful.”
OGP’s role isn’t to replace every system. It’s to expand the field of what’s possible.
“OGP really exists as a place for the Singapore government to try new things out,” says Amelia. “We are an incubator. We help explore other options, other possibilities.”
ERP X, which is still in the early stages of development, isn’t going to be a substitute for ERP 2.0. But it’s already revealed a blueprint for smarter, more human-centred government tech: Agile development over rigid planning. Citizen-first design over bureaucratic compliance.
“Public feedback on ERP 2.0 has been intense,” Christabel notes. “Some of the comments I’ve seen online about the teams and the people involved are very harsh.”
“Anyone hired into a role inherits its rules—the KPIs, the processes, the way things have always been done. It’s difficult to be the one who disrupts things. But that’s what I love doing. And OGP gave us the space to explore.”
What Comes After ERP X?
ERP X has come a long way since its early days. But Christabel candidly tells me she thinks there’s still room for improvement. For instance, when we hopped into her family car to try out the app, she ended up having to redo the onboarding process as she’d switched mobile phones.
But even with the typical hiccups you’d expect during the pilot stage, the app works. As an occasional driver myself, I’d much prefer paying for ERP with my credit card over digging up a physical cash card.
Realistically, though, the point of ERP X is not to stop ERP 2.0 in its tracks. Half a billion dollars have already been spent. That train has left the station.
Ultimately, what projects like ERP X disprove is the notion that large-scale public infrastructure can only be delivered through massive, top-down processes, with little room for iteration or user empathy. In a few months, a small team built a working prototype that reimagined an entire national system.
It also busts the myth that Singapore’s public service is short on imagination.
Even though she’s moving to the UK to further her studies, Christabel says she’s keeping the ERP X app installed on her phone. As she points out the trial cameras to me, there’s no bitterness—only pride.
Working in government was something she found very exciting and very creative, she says.
“You don’t often think that way about government work, but if you dare to dream and want to fix things, there’s so much potential and empowerment in being unafraid to say what you think.”
“Designers in tech often say it’s difficult to ‘earn a seat at the table’. But don’t wait to be invited. Design it anyway, create a plan. Find ways into the right rooms. People can be convinced.”
