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Jake Van Der Kamp

'So you were finally proven right that the guys who wanted to justify the OTT public infrastructure works have been cooking the population figures books for years!'

Reader e-mail,

February 23

WELL, I MIGHT not put it quite as forcefully as that, but the surprisingly low population figures from the 2006 by-census do indeed argue very strongly that the government's infrastructure plans are OTT (over the top).

And if Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen wants to clear himself of any possible accusations of 'cooking' the population figures, he would do well to get up on a podium immediately and say: 'Folks, I got it wrong in emphasising infrastructure in my re-election platform. We'll have to rethink this.'

It will have to be a big rethink. The by-census shows that the government had overestimated population growth by more than 100,000 people over the past five years. Our population is only 2.4 per cent greater than it was in the 2001 census, not the 4 per cent of previous official estimates. This has serious implications for infrastructure planning.

What makes it even worse is that our infrastructure plans are actually based on population projections much higher yet than even these erroneous official estimates.

The first chart should give you the picture here. The red line along the bottom represents the actual trend of population growth as corrected by the 2006 by-census. The latest figure is 6,900,700 people as of December last year. The blue line represents the previous estimates.

Now look at the green line. This represents the population projections of Strategy 2030, a big government study conceived some years back for purposes of long-term planning.

Strategy 2030 has gone somewhat moribund recently but the population numbers I have taken from it are still its most updated ones and they say that by the end of  last year, our population should have been 7.29 million, 5.6 per cent greater than the actual count. This is an enormous gulf in urban planning.

Worse yet are the population projections on which our transport planning is based. These come from the Third Comprehensive Transport Study (CTS 3), a big planning exercise that was started in 1997 and has clearly not taken much account of a slower pace of growth since that time.

The magenta  line on the first chart shows you the end-2006 population figure still in use for CTS 3, an unbelievable 7.7 million people, 11.6 per cent higher than fact.

But believe it. The CTS 3 study is still on the Transport Department's website and  is regularly updated. It is the one to which our planners refer when they regularly tell us that they need tens of billions of dollars more for roads and bridges, all of it money we could save if they would only look at the facts.

To give you another indication of how far out of line the CTS 3 study has truly become, look at the bar chart. The red bars show you the actual growth in each indicator from 1997  to 2006. The blue bars show you what CTS 3 forecasts.

Thus, CTS 3 says that the number of private cars on the road should be 38 per cent greater than at the end of 1997. The actual number is 13 per cent. CTS 3 says that there should be 25.4 per cent more goods vehicles. The actual number is 5.8 per cent fewer.

Let me emphasise again that it is the wildly false numbers, not the up-to-date accurate ones, that our bureaucrats use when they draw up their infrastructure budgets.

This is madness. I am reluctant to accuse them of cooking their population figures but, with the 2006 by-census now in hand, they can't possibly do anything with Strategy 2030 or CTS 3 other than throw both studies in the rubbish bin.

Our government's capital spending plans urgently need a complete rethink and it needs to start with the chief executive's campaign platform. He does not like admitting he is wrong but in this matter of infrastructure spending he now clearly is wrong and should be honest about it.



Donald's best option: admit error and rethink capital spending plans