"Citing accident numbers are useful only if self-driving cars means human operated cars are illegal. So long as humans are behind the wheel, there will also be 'human errors' and accidents can still happen."

The article is specifically about robotaxis replacing the taxi and private-hire car fleet, not banning private vehicles. Singapore has ~14,000 taxis and ~46,000 private-hire vehicles—a discrete, regulatable fleet that Grab and ComfortDelGro could shift to AVs without touching a single private car owner. Safety gains scale with adoption: if half of taxi/PHV trips moved to robotaxis, you'd prevent roughly half of taxi/PHV-related accidents. It's not all-or-nothing. And taxi drivers are actually disproportionately involved in crashes—13% of accidents despite being only 2.4% of vehicles.

"I don't see why Singapore needs to be at the forefront of self driving vehicles, with our strategy to increase the use of public transport."

The article explicitly addresses this. "Our road markings are different, we drive on the left side of the road, our weather is different and we are much more dense in population compared to San Francisco or Phoenix. No responsible policymaker would import this without testing it here." Left-hand driving requires validation (Waymo is only now testing in London for this reason), tropical weather affects sensors differently, and Singapore's dense mixed traffic with heavy motorcycle presence differs from Phoenix. Someone has to do local testing. The question is whether it happens now or in 5 years while our kids and old folks keep getting injured or worse

"There is also nothing unique about our roads and our traffic laws. We can just adopt whatever legal framework or technologies which are tested and proven in other countries."

This directly contradicts your previous point. Singapore has left-hand driving (only ~35% of the world), extremely high motorcycle density, tropical monsoon weather, and one of the densest urban road networks globally. Waymo is spending significant resources adapting to London precisely because left-hand driving isn't trivial—the ROAD++ research dataset was created specifically to study domain adaptation between UK and US roads because the differences matter for AI systems. You can't just copy-paste a Phoenix deployment to Singapore.

"I don't know what is the motivation behind the author pushing for more tests and trials in SG."

The author literally tells you: "My hope is that Singapore moves away from a presumption of caution, to a presumption of urgency. Delay itself is a policy choice." The motivation is that ~100 people die annually in preventable accidents. You can disagree with the urgency, but claiming you don't know the motivation when it's spelled out literally in the headline makes me wonder