‘I’m sure I am not the complete vehicle yet’: Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow

The first time Jeffrey Siow stepped onto a plane, he was 19 and headed for Cornell University in New York on a Singapore government scholarship.

Before the trip, he and his mother went to a shop in their Potong Pasir neighbourhood to buy a suitcase. “We had never really bought a big suitcase before,” he recalls.

During a transit stop at Los Angeles International Airport, he heard an announcement calling his name. “When I went to the counter, they told me my suitcase had split in two. I lost half my clothes, including most of my underwear. It wasn’t a great start to school.” 

With help from airline staff, he taped up the suitcase as best he could. “I was just hoping it would arrive in one piece.”

He is matter-of-fact in relating this undoubtedly mortifying experience. “The suitcase was okay, but maybe not fit for purpose for a long flight,” he says, dryly. 

When he finally arrived at Cornell, it dawned on him that it was nowhere near bustling New York City as he had assumed when he applied for it.

“I didn’t realise there was a difference between upstate New York and New York City,” he says with a wry laugh. “Really suaku (country bumpkin).”

Over lunch, the 48-year-old Acting Minister for Transport is self-deprecating, self-aware and reflective. He comes across as comfortable in his own skin, but also struck by how, at various points in his life, he had found himself out of his depth but managed to make the most of things.

He has chosen to meet at Amber West, a fine-dining restaurant in ITE College West, where food is prepared by student chefs and served by students.

The campus is in Choa Chu Kang, where he is a Member of Parliament. There is another reason for the venue. Earlier in his civil service career at the Ministry of Education, he worked on the ITE sector.

The restaurant is fully booked and we are given a table in a quieter corner of the dining room. Through the large windows behind him, trains can be seen gliding along the Bukit Panjang LRT track near Jalan Teck Whye station. 

We both order the seafood toast to start. For the main course, I choose the miso-glazed salmon and he opts for a plant-based zha jiang mian. He is wearing a light pink shirt and navigates the dark-sauced noodles with some caution.

We have met once or twice before, when he was the principal private secretary to then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong from 2017 to 2021. He had an easy manner then. Now that he is in the Cabinet, he seems much the same.

Siow was second permanent secretary at the ministries of Trade and Industry and Manpower when he left the civil service after 24 years to join the People’s Action Party and contest the May 2025 General Election. Soon after, he was appointed Acting Minister in the Ministry of Transport (MOT) and Senior Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance.

The transport portfolio was familiar territory. From 2012 to 2017, he was a director at MOT. Since returning to the ministry, he has dealt with issues such as train disruptions and the high prices of certificates of entitlement. He also co-chaired the Economic Strategy Review committee on global competitiveness.

“It’s been very intense,” he says of his first year in politics. “I’m sure I am not the complete vehicle yet, but I’m picking up a lot of new skills, doing new things and really getting out of my comfort zone.”

He describes his civil service career as being a “product developer”, while politics is being a “product manager”.

In the former, you build policy. In the latter, you rely on others to develop it, then defend it to the public. “You have to trust the team to be able to give you the best possible product, and then you explain it to people.”

He has had to learn new skills like communicating with the public. “I’m still figuring it out. I don’t know yet whether I will be any good at this, but I’m working at it.”

One conclusion he has reached is that there is little point in trying to project a carefully crafted image. “In the age of social media, it’s very hard to pretend to be somebody else. The odds are you will get caught. So it’s best to be the best version of yourself, but still be yourself.”

Politics has brought him into much closer contact with the people affected by policy. At Meet-the-People Sessions, he encounters circumstances that do not fit neatly into policy categories. “It’s the last mile,” he says. “You see where policy meets lived reality.”

The cases can stay with him long after the sessions end and he sometimes struggles to sleep. “It’s all still in your head.”

What sustains him most, he says, are the grassroots volunteers. His area includes newer housing estates as well as a part of the new town of Tengah. Many volunteers are fairly new and more community driven than politically motivated.

He laughs as he recalls that when the PAP conference was coming up in Changi, they asked if they could skip it because of how far it was from Choa Chu Kang.

“They are neighbours and friends who just want to do things together, help people and improve their community,” he says. “I love working with them. Every time I feel tired, I think of them and I feel I have to do my part too.”

Even his mother has become part of his constituency community, joining volunteer activities and forming friendships with members of the grassroots team.

Odds of being born here

Siow was born in 1978, the elder of two children. His younger brother works in the private sector. The family lived in a rental flat in Henderson before moving to a three-room flat in Potong Pasir, then another flat in Serangoon HDB estate.

His father worked in a coffee shop in Hougang, taking orders and making and serving coffee. He is pensive when he talks about his father, who died in 2021.

“My father was a working-class man. He worked from 3pm to 1am and I didn’t see a lot of him as a child. Growing up, I was very appreciative of the contributions he made to the family, but there weren’t a lot of opportunities to talk to him about, you know, major decisions in life,” he says.

“As I grew older, especially when he fell sick, we connected a lot more. He wasn’t around when I decided to enter politics, but I like to believe that he would have supported me all the way.”

His mother worked briefly as a part-time POSB teller but was largely a homemaker. The family spoke Hokkien at home and English was not part of his early environment.

His first day at Cedar Primary School remains vivid. “I couldn’t speak English. I had to use hand signals.” 

But he adapted quickly, helped by a reading habit encouraged by his mother and their neighbour, a teacher who would hand him books. Books were central to his life and he fought to win prizes at school as that meant he would get vouchers to buy books.

He made it to Raffles Institution. I remark that he must have done well at the Primary School Leaving Examination to get into RI.

“I guess so, but when you get to RI, you realise very quickly that you are not the smartest person around,” he says. “Everybody seemed so smart and to know more. It took a bit of adjustment. But you find your groove eventually and figure things out over time.” 

He joined the National Police Cadet Corps and hung out with close friends who played football and enjoyed board games.

A memory that still sticks was computer class. His family did not own a computer, and he remembers not knowing how to turn it on.

He got his first computer only when he was in university. But he doesn’t frame this as hardship. While he didn’t have a computer at home, he did have a typewriter with a correction function.

His mother would help him type some of his school projects. “We had a fun time, taking turns to type on the typewriter,” he smiles.

He adds: “Many Singaporeans of my generation went through similar things. As living standards improved, so did opportunities.”

He was aware that others had more resources or exposure than he did, but says he never felt he wanted for anything. His attitude was that he would manage. “You just had to work a bit harder and figure things out.”

At Raffles Junior College, he decided on a whim to run for student council despite not being a natural leader. “I wasn’t particularly charismatic and I didn’t have a lot of friends to vote for me,” he says. “It was a shot in the dark. The point wasn’t winning. It was doing something unfamiliar.”

Some friends helped him make banners with the slogan “Vote like Siow/For Jeff Siow”. He was elected to the council.

When the time came to go to university, he knew he wanted to study overseas and Cornell was the first to accept him. He enjoyed the flexibility of the American university system and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics & Government, and a Bachelor of Science in Urban & Regional Studies. He later got a Master of Business Administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He met his future wife through a scholarship mentoring network in Singapore. She was also a government scholarship holder headed for Cornell. They reconnected in the US and married a decade later. They have a son, aged 16, and a daughter, aged 14.  She is now in the private sector.

He returned from the US to do his national service. His first job as a civil servant was at the Ministry of Manpower, chosen partly because the North East MRT line could take him straight from his home in Serangoon to the office. 

For the next two decades, he made his way through the civil service with stints in the Civil Service College, Ministry of Education and MOT, and serving as principal private secretary to Lee. He went on to become managing director and chief operating officer at Enterprise Singapore and became a second permanent secretary.

Each move, he suggests, was about being open to the opportunity when it came, and entering politics was part of the same leap.

From starting school not knowing how to speak English to becoming a minister is undoubtedly a success story. What was key to that trajectory, I ask him.

He says he benefited from the system, was given opportunities and had important mentors along the way. But basically, it was because he was born in Singapore at the right time.

“You could be the same person, but if you were born elsewhere, the outcome would be very different,” he muses. “Singapore is very small. What are the chances of being born here? Very low.”

Having been helped by the system, he says he wants to strengthen it for others, which is where being a politician comes in.

His vision for the transport portfolio is to increase mobility options. He also wonders aloud if the time might be right for Singapore to have a transport museum, to celebrate not just the hardware but also the people behind the infrastructure and the lives it connects.

He still remembers how he and his father took joy rides on the MRT’s North-South Line when it was launched in the late 1980s.

Asked about his leadership style, Siow says he emphasises teamwork. “It’s important for me to achieve success, not individually, but together with others. The achievement is much more real when shared, when you work towards a collective goal.”

The Liverpool fan likens it to playing football. “I was never the best player. I just gave 110 per cent. In football, what matters is working as a team towards a shared goal, whether to win or simply to play well. That’s what makes it enjoyable and meaningful.”

What we ate

Amber West

ITE College West, 1 Choa Chu Kang Grove, Block 2 Level 4

One three-course lunch (seafood toast, plant-based zha jiang mian and fruit plate, coffee): $20
One three-course lunch (seafood toast, miso-glazed salmon, chocolate cake, coffee): $24

Total: $44

The interview has stretched past 2½ hours, but the time has slipped by easily. As he poses for the photographs, we catch sight of his socks – bright bands of yellow and orange. It is a flash of colour from a man who otherwise presents himself as understated.

Before leaving, he thanks the student chefs and servers and offers a brief pep talk about always doing their best. Then he heads off, the Transport Minister on the move.