I LIKE MY news short and to the point. It is why I have an affinity for snippets of two or three paragraphs, the sort that barely rate a headline. On Wednesday they gave me a treasure trove in this newspaper. Here we go:
Route 3 operator is asked for discounts: Route 3 is the private tollway on the western side of the New Territories, the one that has suffered from traffic levels far below initial projections and that the Transport Department has proposed to gut even further by building the non-toll Route 10 beside it.
The government has Route 3 over a barrel obviously and now, as a quid pro quo for extending its franchise past 2025, wants it to offer more discounts to cross border goods vehicles. Route 3's response was ambiguous. It just wants more traffic.
The response of almost anyone else looking at it can only be that the government has set the cart before horse on the roadways again. Cross-border goods vehicles licences are issued by a monopoly across the border and nobody gets one free.
I cannot give you precise figures. For some unfathomable reason, and I could not possibly guess what that would be, it is just a complete mystery, the people who issue them do not seem to welcome great attention to them. It seems there are about 14,000 such licences issued at the moment, just the right number to generate an income to the issuers of, I would guess, up to HK$1 billion a year.
Might it not be a good idea for our government to put pressure on the Guangdong authorities for the dissolution of this arrangement before asking a loss-making company in Hong Kong to pick up the burden of reducing logistics costs?
Workplace fears over soccer bets: Websense, an American firm that tracks Internet usage says there are now 473 Chinese language gambling Web sites, triple the number of a year ago, and that 76 per cent of employers recently surveyed in Hong Kong regard gambling at work as their main concern.