I refer to the great concern shown in so many letters about the fast deteriorating air quality in Hong Kong and regionally.
In Hong Kong, we have a solution to the emission problem created by buses. It is the world's first double-deck, air-conditioned, zero-emission trolley bus. It has been developed by our very own Citybus engineers and has been around for three or four years, but it is having trouble being noticed at a time when you would have thought that it would be selling like hot cakes.
This trolley bus is comfortable, powerful, quiet, quick off the mark, smooth and carries a full load of passengers. It has regenerative braking which feeds electricity back into the power supply system when the trolley bus decelerates, travels down slopes or brakes.
It is an electric vehicle which, at a time when diesel oil prices are going through the roof and air quality is plummeting, should be on the roads of Hong Kong proving itself. A few years ago, a team of engineers took an existing three-axle bus and converted it into an ultra-modern trolley bus. Very importantly, there is no reason why many of our existing diesel-powered buses cannot be similarly converted to run 'clean and quiet' on city streets.
All day, our buses accelerate from one bus-stop and decelerate into the next. This greatly increases their fuel consumption, dumping polluting exhaust gases and raw heat into the atmosphere in large quantities. But no matter how hard a trolley bus is driven there will be no exhaust gases released because it uses zero-emission 'green' technology. Another obvious advantage is that it runs extremely quietly.
Remember, there is no such thing as an environmentally friendly internal combustion engine. Even if scientists were able to eradicate toxic fumes from the exhaust of diesel buses, these will still pump out huge amounts of carbon dioxide and heat. Of course, the infrastructure - overhead power cables -would need to be put in place for trolley buses, but isn't the cost of this well worth the gains in air quality?