SINGAPORE - With the number of cars on the roads approaching a million, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) intends to further lower the vehicle growth rate.

For the period from February 2015 to January 2018, the annual vehicle growth rate will be lowered from the current 0.5 per cent to 0.25 per cent.

This will be reviewed again in 2017, said the LTA in a statement on Thursday.

It also announced that in order to maintain a more stable supply of COEs in each COE category under a lower vehicle growth rate, the contribution rate to Open Category (Cat E) from other vehicle categories will also be reduced from the current 15 per cent to 10 per cent from February 2015 onwards.

COE quotas are determined largely by the number of vehicles scrapped in the preceding three-month period.

LTA also announced the November to January certificate of entitlement quota (COE) on Thursday. For this period there will be 11,932 premiums available, or about 3,977 premiums per month. This is about a 5.3 per cent increase on the current quota which is about 3,777 per month.

For the small car category or Category A, there will be 1,396 COEs available per month, up from 1,143 monthly in the previous quarter of August to October.

For Category B or, big cars, there will be 1,138 COEs available every month, up from 1,010.

For the open category, of Category E, which ends up mainly being used for cars, the monthly quota will be 527, up from 478.

As for the commercial and good vehicle category, there was a significant drop in the number of available COEs monthly, from 515 in the previous quarter to 282 in the coming quarter.

LTA explained that many of the commercial vehicle COEs were being made available directly in the market rather than through the bidding system. This is because the number of vehicles replaced under the Early Turnover Scheme as a proportion of the number of deregistrations has significantly increased from 20 per cent during the February to April period compared to 70 per cent in the November to January period.