We beg to differ with your editorial of April 8 headlined, 'No more chaos'.
While The Hongkong and Yaumati Ferry Co Ltd (HYF) apologises for the inconvenience caused to its passengers as a result of change of service schedules as well as the smart-card ticketing system breakdown, we do not agree that there was 'chaos' in the first week of this month.
We would maintain that the problems experienced by passengers, such as delays on their office-bound trips, were teething troubles which could happen during a normal ferry operation to any ferry operator (or other transport operators for that matter).
What is unfortunate is that the problems occurred at the same time.
We did not plan for a worst-case scenario, but we did have contingency plans to solve possible problems and they were implemented swiftly when these problems arose.
For example, due to the smart-card ticketing system breakdown there were queues on the evening of April 1 at Central's Cheung Chau Pier and then on April 2 at around 10am and again at noon at Central's Mui Wo Pier. On all three occasions, we were able to solve the queuing problem within half an hour.
There have been a few cases where 20 to 30 passengers have been left behind at island piers during morning rush hours, but they were quickly taken care of when we deployed our extra vessels.
