Most cities find out sooner rather than later that vehicles have a rapacious appetite for any available road space, and that it is totally impractical to endlessly build infrastructure in a vain effort to meet this insatiable demand. The term 'asphalt jungle' all too soon becomes a reality. The car and the taxi are the most inefficient users of road space, and need to be controlled. In our compact city, which is well served by public transport, a private car is not so much an essential means of transport as a socio-economic status statement, and unbridled use will eventually lead to gridlock.
Singapore has a road-pricing policy, and recently London has introduced this to its central area. Zonal road pricing is a valid method of traffic management. The technology is available, and the concern of privacy is a red herring that can be overcome.
Both places have shown some success, but does Hong Kong possess the political will to implement such a scheme? I doubt it when I see the legislators' car park in Jackson Road crammed full with luxury private cars. Singapore succeeded with implementation because the then prime minister Lee Kuan Yew was characteristically single-minded and Mayor Ken Livingstone, the driving force behind London's scheme, famously either walks, cycles, or takes the bus. Perhaps, initially, there is a more simple way to proceed. A great many of Hong Kong's and Kowloon's traffic jams can be traced to the harbour tunnel bottleneck, which is not being relieved by the Western Harbour Tunnel, because of under utilisation for cost reasons.
A scheme could: Collect a surcharge from private cars and taxis travelling southwards from Kowloon to the island at all three harbour tunnels during the morning prime-time between 7am and 10am, Monday to Friday. Subsidise the Western Harbour Tunnel with the funds collected so that the charges for goods vehicles and buses could be reduced to the same level as the other tunnels (at any time and either direction).
There would then be an incentive for the heavy vehicles and goods vehicles to use the new tunnel. Such a scheme would cut down the traffic in Central, take some pressure off the original harbour tunnel, do away with the need for the contentious Central and Wan Chai reclamations, and reduce the long tailbacks we now experience at the rush hours at both ends of the day. It also has the benefit of being easy to implement.
CHRISTIAN ROGERS, Wan Chai