Tampines: local weather, transport and housing

Tampines is built on a hole. The area was quarried for sand through the middle of the twentieth century, and the estate that now houses several hundred thousand people sits on ground that was worked out and then filled. The name comes from the tempinis, a hardwood tree that grew across the area before either the quarries or the flats.

It is one of the larger housing estates in the east and one of the earlier ones to be planned as a regional centre rather than a dormitory, an attempt to put offices, retail and civic functions in the same place as the housing, so that a working day did not have to begin with a journey to the city.

Whether that worked is measurable, and the measure is the rail network. Tampines is served by two lines, which is the signature of a place the transport plan treats as a destination rather than an origin.