Warped view is a pointer to the future of public transport
'Some opposition politicians will complain the cost of an MTR project is too much or some local residents may lose out.'
Anonymous consultant, China RailWorld Summit, Beijing SCMP, January 24
Stand anywhere that gives you a clear view across the harbour from the Central waterfront and you will notice an oddity, a ring of densely packed very tall buildings just the other side of that piece of Kowloon wasteland dubbed a cultural district.
Tall buildings sprouted all over Kowloon when height limitations were lifted with the relocation of the airport from Kai Tak in 1998 but, even so, this ring of new buildings is an oddity. It sits distinctly separate from the rest of Kowloon and around it all is still just muck, construction rubble and temporary roadways. What strange planning anomaly spawned this ugliness?
It was an ugliness created for the benefit of the Modern Town Redevelopment Co (MTRC), otherwise known as the Mass Transit Railway, an entirely inappropriate name as, aside from station advertisements that present it mostly as a promoter of women's underwear fashions, it is primarily a property firm that operates loss-making railways as a sideline.
And whenever it is about to crawl out of loss at last, it proposes some new uneconomic railway project so it can stay in the red forever.
What happened in this case is that our Donald, when he was financial secretary back in 1999, publicly said he could value this thing at HK$100 billion when listing it on the market. That was until he mentioned this figure to the investment bankers, who told him that the public purse may have put HK$100 billion into the MTR but the investing public wouldn't value it at much more than HK$20 billion.