Opinion | Government should stop coddling private road users
Philip Bowring says that a government flush with funds from land sales should nevertheless find better use for its billions than building roads that exacerbate jams and pollution
It has been said that the definition of a developed country is one where rich people take public transport. That certainly applies to most but the mega rich in places such as downtown Tokyo, New York and London. So those thinking about poverty issues in Hong Kong would do well to ask why so many people drive to work in this most dense of cities. That I am a car-driving beneficiary of the system here does not make me an admirer of it.
Top of the list of those who are only moderately well off but drive to free or low-cost parking spots near their work are civil servants. I do not have a count of the number of spaces available to them in prime locations but the assumption that driving to work is normal permeates many policies here, to the detriment of the vast majority who must use public transport.
Central is overprovided with parking spaces. Spaces there should be scarce and very expensive but they are not - in the Sydney central business district, cost averages HK$100 an hour and can go up to HK$150, compared with a maximum HK$30 here.
The colonial government's retreat from road pricing nearly 30 years ago in the face of taxi protests should have led to other means of limiting car usage. But, instead, the bureaucracy has pandered to minority interests by, for example, failing to raise the central Cross-Harbour Tunnel toll, thereby exacerbating congestion and pollution. Instead of discouraging car usage, it is now wasting HK$28 billion on the Wan Chai-Central bypass, a project whose logic can only be explained by reference to a bureaucracy that inhabits the numerous centrally located offices of the government and its offshoots.
Official attitudes of providing for the rich at the expense of the majority are further illustrated by the deliberate failure of the police to crack down on illegal parking of limousines in areas such as Central. How can the police make such a fuss about the possible Occupy Central movement when they have such contempt for the law they are supposed to enforce? How can Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying say he is focusing on poverty when the rich are given a free pass to park as they wish?
Instead of learning from these mistakes, or from cities in the van of urban planning, the government is now planning, and in some cases already building, a vast system of highways and spaghetti junctions for east Kowloon and the Kai Tak area as though it were trying to follow 1960s Los Angeles.
Road space is grossly underpriced in Hong Kong at a time when housing is grossly overpriced. There is a connection between such mispricing by a government which controls land supply. Proper road pricing would not only reduce the need for more new roads but would speed up the buses and mini-buses used by the majority.