Worried by the recent bus crashes? At least today's buses have brakes, unlike earlier forms of road transport. As a four-year-old said as he and I passed by Hong Kong's rickshaw pullers, they are 'the Star Ferry skelingtons' and you can see what he means.
The remaining members of this trade are stick-thin and have a distinctly pickled, cadaverous look. In fact, they look like they were the first members of the profession, which started 120 years ago.
But the next time you watch these men, charmingly occupied fleecing tourists, reflect for a moment on their long and distinguished history. The rickshaw pullers are arguably the most successful form of road transport Hong Kong has ever had.
This is a genuine accolade. Hong Kong has 'perhaps the most modern and efficient public transportation system in any of the great cities of the world', Peter Hall, an authority on civic planning, said in a 1984 book, The World Cities.
The rickshaw drivers are, I feel, a kind of missing link between Hong Kong as a romantic Victorian seaport, and today's Hong Kong, more of a giant concrete shopping mall. And with their surliness, their money-mindedness and the inevitable cigarette seemingly glued to their lower lip, the rickshaw-wallahs are the early hominid precursors of the modern, grouchy, Hong Kong minibus driver.
If you wanted to go from A to B in the 1840s, you walked; you mounted a horse (large numbers of which were imported by the British soon after they landed); you rode on the horse-drawn carriage (there was only one), or you were carried by coolies.