November 2, 2022

In ‘What MRT travel numbers tell us about work from home trends’ (The Straits Times, October 2022), Professor Ivan Png (NUS Business School, NUS Department of Economics, and NUS School of Computing) examines the question of whether professional workers are returning to the office or still working from home.

Although it is difficult to gather sufficient data to answer the question, Prof Png looks at the evolution of transit ridership and residential electricity consumption in Singapore to gain some insights. For instance, there was a drastic drop of transit ridership during the Circuit Breaker period in 2020, accompanied by a rise of residential electricity consumption.

By August 2022, electricity consumption had come down to the pre-pandemic level, but travel on public transport was still markedly lower than it used to be. The discrepancy could be because workers started to commute by private transport more often, or that the tourism industry had not fully recovered yet.

In order to pin down the reasons more precisely, Prof Png calls for the government to publish more data and enhance its accessibility.

Read the article in The Straits Times here: https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/what-do-mrt-travel-numbers-tell-us-about-work-from-home-trends