Reasons to hail Hong Kong’s public transport

Let me peer back nostalgically to innocent days in 1982, living in Beijing’s Friendship Hotel in the city’s far northwest and commuting daily along the newly completed ring road No 3 in China Daily’s only car to the Xinhua news campus (home to the China Daily then, too) in the northeast of the city.

That lumbering 30- to 40-minute commute, normally at 6.30 in the morning as the sun rose, was an eerie lonely journey, the road shared only with occasional ox carts and lean-muscled night-soiled vendors peddling their odd little bicycle-powered slop-filled carts out into the rural suburbs to nourish the farm fields still snuggled close to the city.

The traffic jams that engulfed me as I arrived at or left the Xinhua campus were the product of hundreds of thousands of bicyclists leaning sternly into the November chill as they passed mountains of cabbages sitting on the pavement, waiting for people to carry them home for rather drab suppers.

Today just 35 years on, ring road No 3 has been swallowed by ring roads four, five and six, and every ring is gutted with four, five and six lanes of cars. Those lean-muscled night-soiled vendors are gone, or at least have been lost in the traffic fug that makes Beijing one of the world’s most pungent cities.

In 1982, a Chinese worker could not legally own a car. Such innocent and simple days. And a most tragically lost opportunity. I recall briefings back then with mainland officials noting that as they built their new cities – from Guangzhou to Chengdu to Beijing – they did not need to rediscover the traumatic pollution-filled errors of other car-clogged cities around the world. Part of that message was that Hong Kong offered a powerful alternative urban development model: build first an excellent mass transit railway system, then build high-rise housing and all social amenities above the stations. That way, they would pre-empt the inevitable graduation from bicycles to cars and save Beijing and other cities across the country from the appalling congestion that has become the privilege of most Chinese city-dwellers today. People would never need cars and never learn to love them.

Today, China is home to close to 200 million cars – over 5 million of them clogging the boulevards of Beijing. Only the US is home to more cars (about 260 million). China’s auto industry is one of the largest in the world, making 24.5 million vehicles a year (twice the total made in the US, and four times the output of German carmakers). More than 24 million vehicles were bought last year, compared with 17.5 million in the US, 3.5 million in Germany and 2.3 million in France. And that is just new vehicles. China’s car ownership is such a recent phenomenon that the second-hand car market (which accounts for two-thirds of the US car market for example) has barely begun to develop. Only in recent weeks has the government lifted laws blocking the sale of second hand cars between provinces. China’s streets are set to become as aggressively gladiatorial as the worst in the world, with congestion matching Mexico City, Istanbul and Bangkok.