Untitled - Civic Exchange

Chapter 2:
Is Hong Kong's Transport System Sustainable
that more people will experience even higher levels of noise for more hours of the day and night.
Meanwhile, mobility will continue to deteriorate, with road speeds as low 14 km per hour by 2016. The
underlying problem is the need to accommodate the transport demands of an additional one to two million
people over the next one and a half decades.
Therefore, Hong Kong transport also fails the second test of sustainability given in Chapter 1. In the
face of expected changes, service levels are projected to decline, while unacceptable external costs
will persist and indeed, increase.
In other words, Hong Kong's current transport system is not sustainable and current government
plans will fail to make it so.
2.3 Evolving transport objectives
Hong Kong's cityscape took shape in the mid-1960s when Hong Kong began to study its internal transport
needs in a systematic manner in response to population and economic growth. A number of important
studies, notably the Hong Kong Mass Transport Study (1967), the Long Term Road Study (1968), the three
territory-wide comprehensive transport studies (1976, 1989, and 1999), and the two white papers on
internal transport in Hong Kong (1979 and 1990) represent the foundation of Hong Kong's current
transport system. The first White Paper on Internal Transport Policy, published in 1979, defined Hong
Kong's first official transport objective:
"The Government's central transport objective is to maintain and improve the mobility of
people and goods." 42
Later publications essentially restate this original objective. In essence, the government aims to achieve an
acceptable level of mobility for both passengers and freight in order to satisfy the transport demand
generated by economic growth and urban development.
The 1979 White Paper also identified three main principles of transport policy in meeting this objective:
• Improvement of the road system;
• Expansion and improvement of public transport; and
• More economic use of the road system.
Planning for sustainability
Questions have long been raised as to the sustainability of Hong Kong's transport system. However, it was
not until 1997 that transport officials acknowledged that they had the responsibility to achieve a sustainable
transport system and modified Hong Kong's transport objectives by noting that transport policy should take
environmental issues into account. Up to this point, the Transport Bureau did not consider sustainability
factors when planning Hong Kong's transport system and regarded environmental protection simply as a
matter of pollution control, which was the job of another government unit.
42 Environment Branch, Government Secretariat (1979), Keeping Hong Kong Moving: The White Paper on Internal
Transport Policy, Hong Kong: HKSAR Government, p.6.
15