A day in a city planner's shoes

IT was a rainy Monday morning and I was in a cab, stuck in crawling traffic on the AYE, and getting later by the minute for an event at the World Cities Summit at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre.

Already, Uber and Grab had failed me when I was desperately trying to book a cab earlier. Google Maps had warned that the PIE was more severely jammed than the AYE, but I was seriously beginning to doubt that.

It was then that the irony of the situation hit me: Here I was, on the way to Singapore's biggest urbanisation forum, and I was trapped in the thick of urbanisation's worst problem - public transport infrastructure, peak-hour congestion and new technologies that don't always work.