On Saturday, the Legislative Council finally approved HK$66.9 billion in funding for the government's proposed high-speed rail link to Guangzhou, but only after the allocation was steamrollered through in the face of considerable popular resistance.
Opposition to the new rail line focused on its planned route and the project's astronomical cost. Relatively few people questioned whether a high-speed rail link to Guangzhou is a desirable thing in the first place.
The new line's proposed price ticket is certainly mind-boggling. At HK$66.9 billion, the 26-kilometre track will cost about HK$2.57 billion for each kilometre, which, as a clutch of commentators have pointed out, will make it the most expensive railway ever built for its length. Astonishingly, it will be more than twice as expensive per kilometre than the undersea Channel Tunnel between England and France.
Part of the reason the new project will be so expensive is because the line will run through tunnels under Kowloon, and as recent experience has shown, tunnelling under busy urban areas is both enormously expensive and fraught with engineering problems.
Ominously, urban tunnelling projects tend to run badly behind schedule and heavily over budget. London Underground's Jubilee line extension opened two years late and 63 per cent over budget. Boston's 'Big Dig' road tunnel was finally completed eight years behind schedule and more than 140 per cent over budget (after correcting for inflation and before factoring in interest costs).
But the supporters of Hong Kong's new rail link claim it is worth the cost. They argue that the new line is crucial to the city's future, and warn that if Hong Kong doesn't build a connection to the mainland's new high-speed rail network as quickly as possible, its economy will somehow be left behind.
