Transport Bureau's responsibility is to curb growth in car numbers: Loh
But finding concrete ways to curtail private vehicle numbers is down to Transport Bureau, says the city's No 2 environment official
Controlling the growth in private car numbers to reduce traffic congestion will be key to improving roadside air quality, but its management remains the ambit of the Transport Bureau, says the city's No2 environment official.
Environment undersecretary Christine Loh Kung-wai said there was a consensus within government on the need to manage the growth in the number of private vehicles in the city.
"From an environmental perspective, our concern of course is that more congestion means more pollution from private cars," she said.
This came after the number of private cars grew by 40 per cent between 2003 and 2013, an increase that alone contributed about 87 per cent of the total increase in all licensed vehicles.
Last week, Transport and Housing Secretary Professor Anthony Cheung Bing-leung told the Legislative Council transport panel that authorities had no plan to set a cap on the number of private cars, despite agreeing that it was necessary to contain this growth.
The bureau will instead raise registration taxes, annual licence fees, meter parking charges and fuel levies for diesel private cars, and will conduct a public discussion on electronic road pricing.
Loh said the Environment Bureau agreed in principle to measures recently floated by the Transport Bureau. But in terms of how to plan or control the growth of the number of private vehicles, it would be up to the Transport Bureau to work out. She did not say if there was a need for a cap.
"Working out a feasible plan will definitely have to be spearheaded by the [Transport Bureau]," Loh said after a joint luncheon with a group of business chambers, where she was outlining the government's progress in improving the city's air quality.
"This is an issue, which the [Transport and Housing Bureau] acknowledges, and of course there are many measures they will have to implement. Once they do, of course it will help the environment."
She agreed greater cooperation was needed between the two bureaus.
Loh said cleaning up vehicles was only part of the solution and the next step would be to "look to other tools to separate people and vehicles".
"We are now looking into a more complex kind of solution where we need different bureaus, the community, transport operators and [businesses] to agree on a set of complex solutions," she said.
Loh said she was supportive of pedestrianisation schemes, but proponents of such plans would have to include details of how they would be implemented instead of just conceptual plans.
The undersecretary credited a slight improvement in roadside air quality last year to a range of policies to control tailpipe emissions - known as the end-of-pipe measures - that began to take effect at the start of last year, including subsidies to help phase out some 82,000 polluting diesel commercial vehicles by 2020.
Loh said the plan had been working, with more vehicles replaced than she had originally imagined.
"From a roadside perspective, we think it's moving in the right direction," she said, adding that Hong Kong would not fail to meet its air-quality targets this year.
Clean Air Network campaign manager Patrick Fung Kin-wai said Loh's comments were reasonable and called for more inter-bureau cooperation on air-pollution issues and demand-side management over "unnecessary growth" in traffic.
"Many people think of air pollution as an environmental and health issue but in fact, roadside pollution is a traffic issue," he said. "The Transport Bureau often puts traffic efficiency over pollution as a priority. This must change."
