Singapore’s accessibility works well within individual systems, but a stroller and older traveler reveal gaps between them on the journey.
For most of the trip, Singapore was remarkably easy to navigate with a stroller and an older family member. In July 2026, a family of three generations moved through Gardens by the Bay, Marina Bay, Raffles Place, Jewel Changi Airport, Universal Studios Singapore and VivoCity with little friction: two parents, a toddler of about a year and a half in a baby stroller, and the toddler’s grandmother, a senior citizen who uses no mobility aid. Clarke Quay was generally easy too, though conditions there can vary with the size of the crowd. The Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) network, which connected nearly all these destinations, was the clearest example: station design, lifts, escalators, connections and platform access made moving a stroller feel routine.
That impression has documentary backing. Singapore's Ministry of Transport (MoT) says every MRT and light rail station is barrier-free, as are 98 percent of bus stops. Pedestrian overhead bridges built after 2018 come with lifts, while 91 older bridges had been retrofitted by April 2025. Even this strongest layer has gradations. The Land Transport Authority (LTA) acknowledged in 2023 that lifts could not be added at every entrance of existing stations, citing Chinatown, where two of six entrances have them, while all entrances to new stations, starting with the Thomson-East Coast Line, are to be barrier-free. A spectrum, in other words, runs even through the best-engineered part of the city.
Two stretches of the trip sat further along that spectrum. The walk toward Murugan Idli, a restaurant at 76 Syed Alwi Road, for breakfast was extremely difficult with the stroller and the grandmother, and Haji Lane in Kampong Glam was difficult in the same way. That is the whole of the first-hand record, and it cannot carry much weight. One family on one trip cannot show how common such difficulty is, who else encounters it, or what caused it, and it cannot speak for tourists in general. A stroller is also not a wheelchair; the two make different demands, and a street that suits one may not suit the other. What the episode supplies is a question precise enough to put to the documentary record: what is known about the physical and administrative character of these two places?
Both fall within conservation areas. The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) gazetted Little India on July 7, 1989, and conserved additional buildings along Syed Alwi Road on January 21, 2008. It gazetted Kampong Glam the same day, and describes Haji Lane there as reputedly Singapore’s narrowest street, “just over 4 meters wide in parts.” Conservation does not, however, make accessibility impossible. URA’s guidelines for these historic districts treat the five-foot way, the covered shophouse walkway, as a pedestrian asset: its tiling must be non-slip, and its level is “to match the adjacent units and open walkway where possible”, with a ramp no steeper than 1:10 where the difference is 175 millimeters (about 7 inches) or less. The same guidelines, however, acknowledge the difficulty. Because shophouses are typically under different ownership and restored at different times, an owner may coordinate a ramp with neighbors, build gradual ramps, or keep the existing step if adjacent units have not been restored.
The rule reflects a practical constraint, and its gradient matches the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) Code on Accessibility in the Built Environment. It also makes continuity along a row a matter of sequence: a level walkway can emerge one restored shopfront at a time. A stroller wheel is indifferent to whose lot a step belongs to.
Responsibility divides again at the property line. The Code applies to new buildings and to additions and alterations, and the Building Control Act also provides accessibility requirements for existing non-barrier-free buildings above 500 square meters when qualifying additions or alterations are carried out. For these existing buildings, the cited accessibility requirements are generally triggered by qualifying works rather than by a universal retrofit deadline. Public-path standards fall under a different regulatory regime. Since 2018, new standalone footpaths have been required to provide at least 1.8 meters (about 6 feet) of clear width, while older paths are widened during rejuvenation “unless there are site constraints”, according to a March 2026 ministerial reply. A lane just over 4 meters wide in parts leaves little room for a footpath of that width beside a roadway. The combination of limited street width and competing uses may help explain why scheduled road closures, rather than wider sidewalks, have been used at Haji Lane. Three regulatory regimes meet at one shophouse row, each operating according to its own requirements. The seams between them are where a pedestrian route can stop being continuous.
History adds a further layer, because the friction in such streets is partly a question of use rather than geometry. A National Library Board history shows that the five-foot way, intended as sheltered pedestrian space, was put to commercial use by traders, that the right to use it was a thorny issue for municipal authorities almost from the start and stayed one for over a century, and that by the end of the nineteenth century they judged a completely free passage impossible to enforce. The tension persists in modern form. In June 2022, six agencies told businesses on Haji Lane and Bali Lane to clear tables, displays and cones from roads and five-foot ways. When scheduled closures resumed the next month, the chairman of the local business association said families with strollers could return, knowing they “can walk freely on the closed roads without worrying about cars,” while restaurateurs described different table allowances for different streets. These are 2022 facts and do not establish what conditions were like during the family's visit in July 2026. They do show a trade-off: pedestrianization hands the roadway to a stroller, and outdoor seating can then claim it back.
None of this overturns the larger finding. Researchers at the National University of Singapore who walked with 12 older adults through a high-rise, high-density neighborhood recorded no complaints about the continuity of sidewalks and none about unevenness or width, beyond slipperiness after rain. Yet they concluded that universal design should go beyond the idea of accessibility toward planning routes with shelter at convenient points. A 2024 study that accompanied 26 older adults and seven people with disabilities found detouring and shortcut-taking to be part of everyday movement through an extended pedestrian network. Residents learn which detours work. A visitor arrives without that mental map, which makes a seam in the route more consequential for tourists in particular.
Travel with a toddler and a grandmother turns a city into a series of handovers: hotel door to sidewalk, sidewalk to station, station to interchange, interchange to attraction, attraction to the walk toward lunch. Each handover has its own owner and its own standard, and that points to a pattern in how accessibility is counted. The official figures describe assets: stations, bus stops, bridge lifts, crossings fitted with extended green time, kilometers of mapped routes. The unit a traveler experiences, the journey, is rarely the unit measured. The World Tourism Organization, now branded UN Tourism, made the argument in a 2016 handbook summary, warning that accessibility must run through the whole tourism chain to avoid “accessibility islands” and asking, “What good is having a fully accessible hotel if the transport to reach it is not accessible?” A station with a lift is an island if the street outside does not connect to it.
Singapore’s policy is moving toward the joints. The 2025 revision of the Code, applying to plans submitted from November 1, 2025, requires entrances that link to neighboring buildings, commuter facilities, park connectors and covered linkways to be accessible, shifting attention from the building to its connections. The Singapore Land Authority (SLA) maps barrier-free routes on its OneMap platform, verified by wheelchair users. A senior official told a March 2026 conference that more than 2,800 kilometers had been mapped, with 6,800 more due by 2027, and described the work as improving “last-mile accessibility.” A newspaper report of the same speech says the mapping is extending to commercial premises, including for parents pushing prams. Coverage is still uneven. The SLA’s published list of covered areas, updated in August 2026, includes Orchard, the Museum area and parts of the Downtown Core, but does not name Little India or Kampong Glam. Because the list is introduced as “including,” however, the absence of those districts should not be read as proof that no mapping exists there. Friendly Streets, the LTA program for making walking, cycling and riding safer and more convenient near neighborhood amenities, is being extended to every public-housing town by 2030, a resident-first agenda whose named sites are neighborhoods rather than visitor districts.
A stroller and a grandmother pose separate tests. The stroller tests whether a route is continuous: whether every level change, curb and surface along it can be taken on wheels. Standards drafted around wheelchair users, such as the 1.8-meter footpath width that lets two wheelchairs pass, appear to carry much of that load.
The grandmother tests something else: distance, shade, rest points, surface transitions and crowding, which are matters of fatigue and fall risk rather than disability. The 2025 Code’s measures for older users, mandatory resting areas at drop-off points and ramp color bands meant to reduce tripping, address precisely these. The city’s own demographics make such needs mainstream. In June 2026, 21.4 percent of citizens were aged 65 or older, putting Singapore into the category commonly described as a super-aged society, and more than one in four citizens is estimated to be 65 or older by 2035. Universal design rests on the observation that needs change with age, injury, pregnancy or luggage. UN Tourism puts it plainly: all people need accessible environments at some point in life.
For a travel party, the cost of a seam is rarely a crisis. It is extra planning: which entrance has the lift, whether the sidewalk will take a stroller beside strangers, how far to a seat, whether the route back is the route out. Whether such friction alters length of stay, spending or the decision to return to Singapore is something the public data cannot yet establish; the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) publishes a travelling-companions survey dataset covering only 2013 and 2014.
The commercial stakes are nonetheless clear. Singapore received 16.9 million international visitors in 2025, who generated a record S$32.8 billion in tourism receipts, as Minister-in-charge of Trade Relations Grace Fu told the 2026 Tourism Industry Conference. That is equivalent to roughly US$25 billion at the 2025 average exchange rate. The STB has named Families with Kids and Active Silvers among four high-potential growth segments and has set a Tourism 2040 ambition of S$47–50 billion in tourism receipts. UN Tourism notes that a high percentage of the world’s international tourists are families with young children or seniors, and a hotel group’s survey of travelers found that nearly half of Asia-Pacific families holiday with three or more generations at least once a year. Accessibility does not by itself decide where families go. As trips become more multigenerational, it becomes part of basic destination quality.
The strongest objection is that friction is the price of the places visitors prize. A Kampong Glam made uniformly smooth could risk losing some of the narrowness and physical character that URA itself singles out, and trading on the five-foot way is a livelihood with a long history. The objection is right about identity but needlessly makes the remedy an all-or-nothing choice. URA’s guidelines already allow lifts within the shophouse envelope, with any shaft that protrudes above the roof kept to the rear slope and below the ridge, and ramps up to the Code’s gradient. The goal need not be uniform smoothness. It could be one legible, continuous path through each older district. Singapore holds the tools to build it: leveling a row’s five-foot way as a single project rather than owner by owner; extending barrier-free routing to the districts visitors seek out, tested with strollers and older walkers as well as wheelchairs; and showing lifts, exits and rest points on tourist maps. The LTA already plans covered linkways connecting MRT stations to Friendly Streets within 800 meters. A comparable focus on the last few hundred meters between station and destination would extend the same logic to visitors. These are inferences from the pattern, not documented plans.
The family’s trip held both halves of the argument: the MRT, Gardens by the Bay, Marina Bay, Raffles Place, Jewel, Clarke Quay, Universal Studios and VivoCity were handled with relative ease, while the walk toward Murugan Idli on Syed Alwi Road and the passage along Haji Lane were markedly more difficult. The second set stood out because the first had raised expectations so high. That is Singapore’s achievement: not that every meter is perfectly accessible, but that so much of the city already shows what seamless accessibility can look like. The next measure of an accessible city will not be trains, lifts, malls or attractions alone, but whether a family can move between them without meeting an unexpected barrier or rebuilding its itinerary around mobility. Singapore’s remaining accessibility challenge appears to lie at those joints, where transport, sidewalks, conserved buildings, commercial activity and tourist destinations meet. A city that already counts its stations and maps thousands of kilometers of accessible routes is well placed to begin measuring and fixing the journey itself.
About the Author:
Bhawna Ahuja is the Head of Content and Communications at IndraStra Global. Her work focuses on tourism policy, cultural sustainability, and development studies, with a particular interest in the intersection of local economies, heritage, and sustainable tourism. She has over nine years of experience in public relations, strategic communications, and insights management. She can be reached on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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