The MTR Corporation is a great company, but our government has made a mess of it. And we are all partly responsible because we demand a cheap, efficient and connected metro. Ex-transport minister Anthony Cheung Bing-leung said the MTR Corp should never have been listed. Lawmaker Michael Tien Puk-sun agreed, saying the city’s metro system would have been more stridently supervised if it had remained a transport arm of the government. Tien was head of the Kowloon-Canton Railway before it was merged with the MTR, so he ought to know what he was talking about. They are wrong. The problem with the MTR is not that it was listed in 2000, but that it has remained under the policy direction of the government, which still owns 75 per cent of the rail operator. People complain how one of the world’s great metro services has gone down the drain. A train crash during testing for a new signalling system is the latest fiasco. Such a popular view is understandable, given all the cost overruns, delays, construction scandals and alleged cover-ups that have been exposed under the MTR’s various infrastructure projects in recent years. But, instead of looking at one scandal at a time, let’s consider all the mammoth projects it was made to do by the government since the second half of the 2000s. The government committed the MTR to building five new lines: the South Island Line, Kwun Tong Line extension, West Island Line, cross-border high speed rail, and Sha Tin-Central Line. The last two were geologically challenging and so especially costly. It’s well-known that within the industry, there was deep scepticism. But the projects made political sense, because people wanted faster and better-connected public transport. The government wanted to revive its plummeting popularity and create construction jobs as an economic stimulus. As a top-level insider put it to me recently: “Their simultaneous launching of such magnitude was tantamount to suicide. There were absolutely insufficient construction personnel at all levels, and the importation of labourers or engineers was almost impossible because of opposition from unions. “What is happening today is, in my opinion and that of many trusted friends in the industry, a direct result of such irresponsible decisions.” Still, the MTR is one of the few rail companies in the world that could and did handle such demands. Now the chicken has come home to roost.