Outside InA HK$5 billion reason to be wary of Hong Kong’s ‘result-oriented’ government

A tunnel that could have been built for HK$88 million has become a HK$5 billion project that will again mar public enjoyment of the Central waterfront

Yet, under the current administration, the project is hardly coming under the public scrutiny it deserves

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An aerial view of the Sha Tin-Central link construction site in 2018. Part of the Central waterfront is going to be closed off for the construction of an overrun tunnel for the Airport Express, tentatively from 2025 to 2032. Photo: Roy Issa

Published: 6:15am, 20 May 2023

In case you missed it, a large part of Hong Kong’s Central waterfront is going to be closed off for most of the next decade as MTR Corporation builds a 460m overrun tunnel for the Airport Express.

I don’t know what upsets me most: the fact that we are going to lose access to some of Hong Kong’s most iconic leisure space again, having only recently recovered it after two decades of reclamation turmoil; that a project originally intended to cost HK$88 million is now set to cost around HK$5 billion (US$640 million); or that almost no one has made a murmur about such an outrageous loss of planning control.

It’s bad enough that we are soon set for several years of disruption nearby as work begins on developer Henderson Land’s Site 3, described by project architect Lead8 as “one of the most important and strategic additions to the city’s Central Business District … an iconic landmark and a social destination dedicated to public enjoyment along the harbourfront promenade”.

Bad too that the Kennedy Town community is set to lose a heavily used waterfront promenade to tunnel works intended to link Hong Kong Island to East Lantau via artificial islands – the so-called Lantau Tomorrow Vision. I am reminded of the grim old joke that Hong Kong would be a terrific place to live if and when they ever finish building it.

But this comparatively modest Airport Express project really seems to take the biscuit. If this thoughtlessness is what John Lee Ka-chiu’s “result-oriented” government is all about, then we need a fresh discussion about what kind of “results” we are talking about.

I suspect that if word of the overrun tunnel project had not leaked from the Harbourfront Commission’s Task Force on Harbour Development when it met late in April, none of us would today be any the wiser about the ramifications of this piece of infrastructural disruption.