Victoria Park slip road slips past public interest guardians

Victoria Park will shrink by 20,000 square feet, lose some of its popular facilities and see hundreds of trees removed - all to make way for a slip road. It's one of those typically anti-civic ideas so beloved of government bureaucrats. Now that construction in the park has started, people are starting to notice and complain. How did the Highways Department get away with it?

Councillors in Eastern District and in the Legislative Council surely share the blame. They should have been vigilant about such incursions into valuable public recreational space and yet have been asleep at the wheel. The funny thing is that we've known about the slip road plan - part of the massive Central-Wan Chai Bypass project - at least since 2006. The department even had an open tender last year, with details about the locations of the road and tunnel published. It appears everyone was fixated on the reclamation row over the bypass so that the slip road just, well, slipped by public attention.

District councilor Jennifer Chow Kit-bing said fellow members were unaware the plan would cut into Victoria Park. Really? Did no one take a look at the map and graphics provided in the open tender? The department may have been sneaky, but a little reading of the documents would have revealed all. It said the road would occupy about 1 per cent of the park, which covers 19.6 hectares. Construction work, started in March, would deprive the public of about 7 per cent of the park's area. The facilities to be lost loss include a children's playground, a nursery compound, a pond and a bowling green; trees will go too. The department said all the facilities except the pond would be rebuilt elsewhere in the park, but did not say exactly where and when.

It's probably too late to stop the slip road now. Construction work has started. The project went through all the stages of public consultation and financing approval. But is it too much to ask those who fancy themselves defenders of the public interest to be more vigilant next time?