Insights on Mobility (2024)

By Damon Chee and Daphne Yow

Discovery+ is a series of online industry panels which give students the chance to interact with working professionals and learn about the careers they aspire to enter. These panels provide youths and working professionals with the opportunity to better understand industry trends, hear first-hand perspectives from industry professionals, and gain valuable advice on entering or navigating these industries.

On 16 January 2024, Advisory hosted Discover+: Mobility, the 79th edition of the Discovery+ series. Speakers on the panel included:

• Ryan Wong (Moderator), Director, Strategy and Business Development, APAC, PTV Group
• Hansen Sun, Assistant Director, Sustainability, Ministry of Transport 
• Allan Tan, Vice President, Head of Technology Division, Private Mobility Group, ComfortDelGro

Attendees included students at various levels of education with a desire to know the different career paths in Mobility, and how to best position themselves for such roles. Below are some key points shared during the session:

How are different stakeholders working together to envision the 45-minute city?

Transport is only one part of the equation when planning for the 45-minute city. Government agencies need to do long-term planning on various plots of land, such as where to site housing, hawker centres or workplaces. Transport is a means to get to these locations so that one can do these activities. When the government consults with their stakeholders to come out with plans, planners need to imagine and foresee the experiences that people might have in the future. The distance to get from one point to another will never change, but the ways to do so can vary.

In any case, the best way to cut travelling times is to locate amenities as close to each other as possible. When this happens, there is no need to travel to the town area as you have amenities in your local town centre instead. There is also an additional merit of sustainability as your carbon footprint is lower if you travel shorter distances.   

What is being done in Singapore’s mobility sector?

One main focus is the electrification of various transport modes, which includes increasing the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). This is primarily to decarbonise the land transport sector by moving away from internal combustion engines that leads to a lot of air pollution, towards vehicles with zero emissions. This will continue over the next couple of years and pick up steam over time.

How is the mobility sector responding to an increased focus on sustainability?

It is moving towards adopting more EVs, but there are factors constraining certain players such as taxi operators. For taxi drivers, their income depends on how long and far they drive, but charging takes up a lot of time. So unless there are more fast charging stations, the drivers will find it difficult to make a living. Operators have to balance between the drivers’ income and the need for sustainability.

In the next five years, where do you expect Singapore’s mobility industry to be? 

There have been a lot more applications of technology infused into mobility: for instance, platforms that offer mobility as a service, helping people to make better travel decisions. People will come up with more of such business ideas. 

There may also be higher prevalence of autonomous vehicles (AVs), or at least a semi-partial state of autonomy. However, we have yet to have very clear policies and regulations regarding AVs. The technology is available, but we need to look at how to actually deploy them here, considering issues like public safety.

A lot of how Singapore’s mobility has been organised still centres around the core - public transit - and that is how you ultimately achieve sustainability, be it in reducing emissions or reducing traffic jams. To give an analogy: no matter how many roads you build, an EV or an AV stuck in a jam is still a car, and our highways have limited capacity. The only way we can really achieve true mobility is through public transport - easier access to mass transit, walking or cycling.

How did you get into this role in mobility and what excites you about it? 

Uber was considered an innovation back then as it was a big deal to be able to call a taxi or a private hire vehicle anytime using your phone. This helps to mitigate the problem where taxis would only appear at midnight to earn the midnight surcharge. Innovation has changed the way people commute, and these types of innovation do not happen often in your lifetime.

As to what is exciting: from an IT perspective, there are a lot of things you can learn. There are about seven layers of programming and communications before you see the final layer where the taxi arrives at your location. When the app is opened, one can observe that the fares are dynamic, which are generated by data models which are in turn, created by data scientists. Data scientists take past training data which looks at demand and supply factors, and past trends to feed into the model, which then generates the price you see on the app.

There are other skill sets which are also needed in this industry such as software engineering, cloud computing and infrastructure, and so on. This whole variety of skills required is also exciting.

How has your career progressed after you graduated from university?

The transport and mobility sector is more of an art than a science. This is because transport planners deal with commuters who have their own lived experience when taking transport, and each of them has their opinion on the best way to move from one point to another. When planning routes, it is important to consider the commuting experience. However, as a planner, one would need to think about the big picture as well, especially for large multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects. One needs to do a cost-benefit analysis and also calculate the possible returns of investment to see if the project is worth undertaking. 

One should not think about mobility in silos as mobility is interdisciplinary in nature. What you study does not matter. Instead, how you think of ways to solve problems matters more.

How did the mobility sector cope during the lockdown in 2020, and how might it cope in future unprecedented circumstances?

When unprecedented events like the pandemic come about, your preconceived assumptions such as ridership forecasting of the MRT in normal situations become inapplicable. When that happened, the government worked with various transport operators to have a coordinated effort to cut down on services that are not needed to reduce operating costs. The level of coordination and strong public-private-partnerships between the government and transport companies sets it apart from other countries where you may see panic and chaos that arose from disruptions. Should another major disruptive incident happen again in the future, the government needs to be able to make the best out of it to the best of their abilities. 

The pandemic also led to a lull period, made it difficult for land transport companies to do business. Companies had to execute business continuity management (BCM) plans to enhance the resilience of their systems, such as issuing masks to drivers, giving them car rental rebates or waiving rental fees. These BCM plans will be implemented as deemed fit for business operations in future unprecedented circumstances.

What are your top reasons why the youth should join this industry?

Not many industries can get this interesting. Transport has not transformed much in the past 100 years since Henry Ford built the first four-wheeled engine. However, in the next 10 or 15 years, we will see a lot more innovation such as AVs and drones which will transform the industry. The emergence of technology and generative artificial intelligence has seen a lot more things being developed today, which will transform how vehicles will move on the land, air and sea today. These reasons are why now is the right time to enter the transport industry.

Another reason is that we have contact with it everyday. Mobility is one career where you can make a big impact on people as everyone experiences it on a daily basis. Beyond technology, people with skills such as engineering, architecture, economics, finance and public policy can also contribute as well. You can start off as an engineer before moving on to policy work and your experiences in the engineering side of things can help you become more rounded in your new role. When things get tough, do remind yourself why you joined this industry. 

You should not confine yourself to Singapore only as the world is your oyster. The global population is projected to reach 10 billion by 2050, where seventy percent of people are expected to live in cities. The question of how to move people around would be crucial when the time comes. One day, you may have to design infrastructure for city inhabitants overseas, and you may feel a huge sense of achievement when your vision comes to fruition.