Recovering the Hours: Pakistan’s Strategy for Smarter Mobility and Governance

Around 5 p.m., Samina Hassan Laghari departs her Karachi office. A half-hour wait for a bus, a journey lasting between 60 and 90 minutes, and a 15-minute walk home combine to create a taxing commute. As detailed in a Dawn report from September 2026, poorly lit roads, speeding traffic and safety concerns make the final stretch particularly challenging.

This experience reflects an economic cost seldom captured in official metrics: the hours lost simply in reaching home.

For Pakistan, lost time is more than an inconvenience; it represents lost opportunity. Hours diverted from work, education, family care or entrepreneurship accumulate, undermining broader economic productivity beyond mere individual frustration.

The issue demands immediate attention. A 2026 Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) brief outlines the country’s long-term productivity decline, identifying structural distortions, regulatory burdens and firm capability gaps as constraining factors. Growth can no longer depend solely on resource accumulation; efficiency—including the management of time—must improve.

A notable example emerged in February, when Dawn reported that ride-hailing firm Yango attributed 832,617 saved hours to its routing technology across Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad in 2025. While based on the company’s own trips, the figure raises a pertinent question: if private operators can quantify time savings, why do public authorities not routinely measure the time their systems cost citizens?

These losses are evident in daily life. Lengthy, unreliable commutes can place jobs out of reach, especially for workers without private transport. For women, difficulties often persist beyond the bus ride; poor lighting, unsafe crossings and the cost of the final walk home add further burden. As Laghari’s account illustrates, transport accessibility depends on more than routing—it requires affordability, safety and predictability throughout the entire journey.

Businesses encounter comparable challenges. The World Bank’s 2022 Enterprise Survey found that 50.7 percent of Pakistani firms reported electrical outages, though the data is now four years old. Outages can halt production, delay deliveries, idle workers and compel firms to invest time and resources in alternatives. Administrative delays further exacerbate friction, requiring repeated pursuit of applications, approvals and payments.

If a private company can estimate the time its routing system saves, why do public authorities not routinely measure the time their own systems cost citizens?

Mehreen Durrani

No national estimate exists for the total economic cost of these lost hours. Yet the country need not wait for such data to begin identifying and addressing avoidable delays.

The foremost priority should be urban mobility. The Sindh Mass Transit Authority, in coordination with Karachi’s transport and municipal agencies, should measure door-to-door journey times on selected commuter routes. Recording should encompass not only in-vehicle time but also waiting periods, transfers and the walk home. Results segmented by gender and time of day—augmented by passenger feedback—can pinpoint unsafe or unreliable stretches. Public dissemination of these results would reveal whether transport improvements are genuinely reducing commute time and difficulty.

A second priority is improved national data. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics should conduct an updated national time-use survey. While the United Nations Statistics Division notes the country’s most recent Time Use Survey dates to 2007, the 2024-25 Household Integrated Economic Survey offers recent income, consumption and social context. A dedicated time-use survey would address a different question: how individuals actually allocate their days across paid work, unpaid care, travel and other activities.

Third, federal and provincial departments should publish service standards for routine public processes. Each should specify expected service durations, responsible agencies and escalation pathways for delayed cases. Departments must then report actual processing times alongside targets. Digital tracking can assist, but migrating an inefficient process online does not resolve underlying issues; the process itself must be simplified, and accountability for delays made clear.

These reforms are pragmatic in that they do not require Pakistan to assign a monetary value to every minute before acting. They instead require public institutions to treat time as a measurable outcome. Individually, a shorter commute, more reliable electricity or on-schedule approvals may seem modest; collectively, such changes enable workers and firms to plan, produce and participate more fully in the economy.

Pakistan has compelling reason to track growth, investment, exports and fiscal performance. Yet these indicators capture only part of the story; they do not reflect the daily friction that excludes people from opportunities or prevents businesses from optimally deploying resources.

A nation cannot recover every hour lost to distance or circumstance. However, it can reduce hours wasted on avoidable inefficiency. Pakistan’s productivity challenge extends beyond producing more with available resources to ensuring people can use their time effectively.

Hours are already being expended. The question is whether Pakistan will continue losing them unnoticed, or finally begin reclaiming them.

Mehreen Durrani is a strategy and transformation independent professional operating at the intersection of policy and technology, driving digital transformation and strategic partnerships to deliver institutional and economic impact.

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