- Resilience is temporal: Climate shocks and disruptions overwhelm cities because demand is synchronised, not because distances are long.

The future city is not only compact, electric, or autonomous. It is time-aware.

- Space-time jointly governs system stress: Land use shapes how we travel. Scheduling determines whether networks break.
- Temporal tools scale faster than urban form: Pricing windows, flexible work hours, and real-time information can reshape demand years before zoning reforms take effect.

Congestion forms when too many trips occur at the same time. Even in compact cities, synchronised schedules create queues, delays, and fragile peaks.

That is why the city transport transitions must layer time on top of space:

Energy-intensive digital infrastructure draws on shared grid capacity with the rest of the economy.

How Singapore integrates AI into markets, work and infrastructure will determine whether it strengthens socioeconomic resilience or quietly raise cost tensions.

Technological growth and affordability do not automatically move together. AI pricing agents can sharpen price discrimination and potentially blunt rivalry without human intention. The labour market may diverge between “super-experts” and commoditised middle-tier roles.

Graphic from: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Will this effect persist over time? How can we refine this policy using evidence and stakeholder feedback?

This is what economic theory predicts when road space is priced instead of rationed. Congestion pricing works because it targets externality. We impose time wastage on other commuters when we join the traffic!

If we price roads as if time were free, we should expect congestion to form. Cordon or distance-based road pricing may not be as effective as time-based pricing. How do we introduce time-based pricing while considering public support and equity?

▪ Time wasted does not only depend on the number of vehicles. It scales with income, occupations and the built environment.
▪ Blunt fixes fail. Time-targeted pricing consistently outperforms uniform tolls.

My research on morning commutes shows three persistent facts:

▪ Peak delays remain stubbornly large, even as cities expand road capacity and introduce congestion pricing.

When commuters converge on similar schedules and routes, each driver imposes delays on others by adding load to the roads. No one pays for that marginal delay. This leads to wasted time!