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Remedies for Disney chokepoints will see us taken for a ride again

DO YOU REMEMBER how the Disney boosters in our government told us that the big plus in setting up a Disney theme park here would be the enormous increase we would get in visitor arrivals to Hong Kong?

They appear to be looking at that big increase a little differently now, with the park set to open within months. They are still asking how we can get these visitors here but not in terms of how we can induce them to come. The problem is rather how we can get them through the chokepoints, if we can at all.

The highest-profile chokepoint at the moment is the gates of the Disney park itself. The government has now asked Disney not to sell tickets at the gate but distribute them through some other means, possibly travel agents. The worry is that the crowds at the gates will be too large.

Disney has taken a wait-and-see approach rather than agreeing immediately. You can just imagine its dismay if the press pack happens to find itself an appropriate Mr and Mrs Wong and their two children who were looking forward to a fun-filled day only to be turned back because they did not know they had to book their slot.

And how will the tickets be divided between visitors and Hong Kong people? Get this one wrong and there are certain to be yelps of protest. There probably will be anyway and more to follow when it is discovered that scalpers are also standing near the gates, as they are sure to be.

Perhaps those bookings will have to be checked against identification to make sure the names match with the tickets and the scalpers are kept away. There will be long line-ups in that case and it will all seem about as fun-filled as going to apply for a new ID card. Oh yes, an enjoyable day out indeed. I can fully understand why Disney wants to think a little before deciding on its ticketing arrangements.

But it is not actually at the gates of the park that the tightest chokepoints will be found. They will actually be at the border as busloads of mainland tourists are brought across. The biggest problem will be at the Lok Ma Chau terminal, now the dominant entry point for bus passengers and the one that has seen the greatest increase in throughput in recent years. Passenger arrivals at Lok Ma Chau now run at 1.7 million a month, 10 times as many as there were only eight years ago and, as the chart shows, far more than arrivals at Chek Lap Kok airport.

What is more, immigration officials now say that Lok Ma Chau can handle only an extra 2,400 bus passengers arriving at peak hours of 7am to 10am, which is exactly when you can expect mainland visitors to the Disney park to want to come through. Put this in the context of estimates that there will be 100,000 visitors a day coming across the border during the week-long National Day holiday in October. Now just think of the fumes rising up from hundreds of idling bus engines at the border and the resulting traffic jams on our side of it.

The Immigration Department wants tour operators to make use of other modes of transport, such as trains or ferries, in order to relieve the pressure at Lok Ma Chau but this is more easily said than done. Those tour operators probably will not be ready to do it unless they face truly long delays with their buses.

What it all comes down to is that the Disney park is indeed likely to bring a boost to our economy, a cost boost. We will have to invest yet more billions to upgrade border crossings, roads and other infrastructure facilities so that visitors to Hong Kong can spend money on goods and services that do not come from Hong Kong and are largely provided by migrant service workers. Others will get the benefit. We will get the cost.

But in the end that was always how it was likely to be. The difference is that we already have more than twice as many visitors arriving each day as we did when the Disney park was first mooted. We never really needed it and all it will do now is make our congestion problems even worse. It is our misfortune that the one chokepoint that could do us some good, the one that chokes off spending public funds for tourist-related projects that never give us a decent return, is the only one we will never get.

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