A recent study by Syed Hasan at LUMS along with Hassan Khawaja and Arsalan Malik conservatively estimates the economic cost of congestion for the entire city of Lahore at more than Rs100 billion per annum.
These kinds of estimates of economic costs offer important insights that should not be ignored by those responsible for urban design. The bigger question, however, is how individual citizens, businesses and government officials spend their time. To that end, various types of time index ought to be calculated ala the consumer and wholesale price indices.
In some sense, economic stakeholders already track or talk about the time ill spent. For instance, the business community complains of the long hours spent on taxation, or preparing documents for international trade etc. The same is tracked in World Bank Doing Business Indices and many other types of comparative governance rankings.
Similarly, those closely following on matters related to governance maintain that a time audit of senior government bureaucrats will reveal that they spend at least 20 percent of their weekly work hours in dealing with various litigations and other forms of accountability even when they are not doing anything wrong.
In the case of individual citizens as well, wasting time in traffic congestion – the subject under LUMS study cited above – is just one of the many ways their time is wasted. Lack of urban planning and scarcity of public goods such as clean water, sanitation, etc means that citizens end up wasting more time in less productive pursuits instead of working, or quality family time, looking after their health, sports, or continuous professional development. Whatever is left is consumed by long dinners with the big fat circle of friends and family. But that’s culture!
The most valuable creation is time. And yet while the economics community has all kinds of indices, even measures to track happiness as an alternative to GDP, it does not track time spend. Taking a leaf from the methodology of the CPI and the WPI, it is time to make three types of time index and release its monthly or quarterly figures: citizen, businesses, and government. The information gleaned from those indices could bring about unimaginable improvements in society; after all, that which is not measured cannot be improved.