the performance of public transport operations, land-use and urban transport planning in hong kong

~ Pergamon S0264-2751(97)00054-1 Cities, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 145-153, 1997

© 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain

0264-2751/97 $17.00 + 0.00

The performance of public transport operations, land-use and urban transport planning in Hong Kong

Joseph Cho-Yam Lau The Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the performance of public transport operations is negatively influenced by land-use, socio-economic and urban transportation development planning in Hong Kong. The failure of new town planning, undemocratic infrastructure planning, and the actively non-intervening policies of monopolized public transport services have influenced public transport operations to not provide mobility to the poor. The first part will review concepts of evaluation in public transport performance, quality of life, mobility and the political influences on public transport policy-making. The latter part will critically investigate some recent land-use, infrastructure and public transport planning that have led to mobility deprivation of the urban poor in Hong Kong. The paper argues that the urban planning policy of Hong Kong has long ignored the mobility needs of the poor. Democratic and open urban transportation planning is suggested in order to enhance the mobility of the urban low-income people. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.

Introduct ion

This study is concerned with the evaluation of the performance of public transport operations in Hong Kong and how this performance influences the mobility of the urban poor. Though performance evaluation can be divided into the efficiency and effectiveness of public transport operations, this paper will focus only on the measurement of the effectiveness aspects, and will concentrate on the mobility provided by public transport services to the urban poor. It is argued that undesirable public transport operations are due to the fact that urban low-income people have weak political power and do not influence development planning. For example, the mem- bers of two important transport policy-making bodies, the Executive Council and Transport Advisory Com- mittee, are selected by the government either from the field of investors or from the elite. Under the present political structure, no low-income pressure groups can take part in any final stages of public transport policy

planning. Naturally the policies, which have been made by the investors, will mostly protect the interests of public transport operators instead of the poor who rely very much on public transport services to reach their basic needs. Ng (1992), in her study on the planning of infrastructure development in Hong Kong, strongly criticized the undemocratic planning process in the building of a new airport and container ports in Hong Kong.

Evalua t ion of per formance of publ ic t r a n s p o r t services

Transport evaluation is concerned with determining the extent to which alternative strategies for supplying the transport requirements of an urban community meet stated objectives and meet a desirable level of management or financial efficiency, such as cost and services output. The evaluation of the performance of public transport systems can be divided into two aspects. The first is to evaluate the performance of

145

Performance of public transport operations: Joseph Cho-Yam Lau

public transport systems on their efficiency (eg, the relationship between cost and operation output of the transport system). The second is to evaluate the systems on their ability to meet basic objectives (eg, the ability to carry the poor to their jobs) (OECD, 1980).

Urban transportation planning also concentrates on effectiveness measurement, which enables decision- makers and elected officials to evaluate their urban transportation policy plan by determining: (a) the degree to which the transportation policies are being followed; and (b) the extent to which these policies attain the basic objectives of the region or country. Hensher (1988) has stated that:

The objectives of bus operations are to provide a social effective and an internally efficient supply of services to the population .... Effectiveness, which reflects the desire for both allocative efficiency and equity, is concerned with issues such as user cost economy, fair accessibility to urban facilities for all (especially non-car owners), and a desire to promote mobility for people of low income (p 364)

Hensher's suggestions not only outline the main aims of the study, but also provide advice for Hong Kong urban transport policy planners when they evaluate the performance of Hong Kong public transport services.

The policies are the guidelines that specify the public transport planning methods used to attain the objectives. In the US, one federal transportation policy is to improve the mobility of the elderly and the handicapped (Rosenbloom, 1982). Public transport performance evaluation has been approached in two different but related ways. One way has been to evaluate the efficiency of the entire system, using system-wide aggregate performance data as provided by the government (see Fielding, 1992) that focuses on cost and benefit ratios or indicators. The other method has been to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of a route or a segment of the system by means of an attitudinal survey about some predetermined performance standards or criteria [eg comfort or reliability of special service railways, see Lemer (1992)].

The limitation of the traditional performance evaluation measures

The above two methods of evaluation suffer from some limitations. For example, they almost exclus- ively use performance standards to evaluate the actual performance of the public transport services leg, measures such as cost-per-vehicle hours of service, cost- per-seat mile of service, or cost-per-person mile served; see Sindzinski (1984)]. These evaluation results sometimes do not give us a full picture to show whether or not the performance of the public transport system has achieved the main objectives of public transport planning (eg, to provide a service which per- mits the transportation disadvantaged to gain access

to opportunities). Furthermore, the attitudinal survey is not based on actual travel data, which indicated that it might not be a reliable evaluation method.

Thus, it is necessary to consider an evaluation measure that is more oriented towards human service and provides an objective means of assessing the performance of the public transport system in terms of the alleviation of defined problems of mobility needs or personal accessibility. It is important to stress that different measures are used for different purposes. For example, the evaluation of cost-effectiveness is used primarily for allocating funds within transit agents, while the evaluation method of accessibility and mobility deprivation is used to measure the social aspects and the quality of life of the people (see Wachs, 1979). The evaluation of public transport performance could follow the concept of the capability approach and measure the performance in terms of mobility, which is defined as the capability to move around freely.

Capability approach of evaluating the performance of public transport services

Measurement of the quality of life can be represented by the capability approach. The capability approach is based on the notion of 'basic capabilities', pos- sessing the freedom to do certain basic activities like working, schooling and visiting medical centres, which are an essential to life (Sen, 1992). The capability approach measures performance according to the extent by which the public transport system is able to maintain or increase the ability of people to employment and education. Thus, providing other things remain constant, the higher the efficiency of the public transport system, the higher the freedom or ability of the people to achieve these functions. In fact, the concept of this evaluation by means of the capability approach is in line with the concept of transport planning in Britain in the 1970s. The Inde- pendent Commission on Transport (1974) stated that:

what is important is not movement.., it is access to people and facilities . . . . The true goal of (transport) planning.., is therefore access. (p 106)

The term 'access' means the mobility of the people to reach the desired facilities or people. Also, it is assumed that the closer the proximity and the higher density of opportunities among locations, the higher the degree of mobility for the disadvantaged (see Mit- chell and Rapkin, 1954).

Political influence on government policy

Apart from land-use planning policy, there is another factor which could exert strong influence on the performance of public transport operations and mobility level of the poor. That factor is political influence, which can always determine the direction of transpor-

146


tation planning. Planning is potentially present in all social relationships, for politics essentially involves the exercise of power. Worsley (1964) has said:

We can be said to act politically when we exercise constraint on others to behave as we want them to... The exercise of constraint in any relationship is political.

From the sociological point of view, politics is power (see Bilton et al, 1987). Concerning power, we can say that the relative power of different groups in society is determined by differences in their access to the important decision-making process. In the absence of equality in incomes and access to power, the urban poor have to meet their travel needs through a com- plex network of institutions and pressure groups. These pressure groups make transportation planning more responsive to their interests and values. As a result, the public participation of the pressure groups affects not only the specific transportation decision but also the means for arriving at that decision (Wellman, 1977).

Political influence on pubic transport policy has been particularly evident in the controversy surround- ing the access of the handicapped to the American bus and underground railway system. With respect to this issue, the conflict between management and political representatives has been clearly drawn, continu- ing without resolution for about 20 years. While generally accepting the principle that public transport should be provided for every American, especially for those who might be most dependent upon it, management has most often favoured the provision of separ- ate systems of door-to-door services for the handicapped. Pressure groups for the handicapped, the elderly and disabled Vietnam veterans, however, lob- bied vigorously for 'mainstreaming' of public transport services, ie providing handicaped access to every bus and train. Consequently, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in the USA stated that:

No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States... shall solely by reason of his handi- cap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial support (Public Law, 1973).

The case of Hong Kong

Considering the hypothesis that the performance of public transport operations is a function of land-use, social-economic and urban transport development planning, we shall focus the case study on the mobility capability of the Hong Kong urban poor. During the process of development, Hong Kong experiences a wide income inequality, the Gini Coef- ficients in 1971 and 1996 are 0.43 and 0.52, respect- ively, and figures show that the inequality of income

has worsened over the past 25 years (Census and Stat- istics Department, 1993, 1996). The case study will divided into two parts. The first part will examine the findings of an in-depth interview study on 40 low- income people and eight experts on the experience of mobility deprivation of low-income people. The findings showed that the urban poor experienced mobility deprivation because they could not afford public transport fares or the basic need activities which gen- erate their public transport trips. The latter part of the paper, based on government reports, will analyse the influence of land-use and infrastructure development planning on public transport operations and how this planning gives rise to mobility deprivation of the urban poor.

Public transport operations in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, about 80% of residents rely on public transport services for their daily travel needs (Transport Department, 1993). The size of Hong Kong is 1071km 2 and its population is about 6.3 million, most of it living in the built-up areas that account for only 17% of its total area. Consequently, public transport services have great demand, and have become an important part of the peoples' daily lives. Public transport services in Hong Kong are provided mainly by four monopolized public transport operators which account for 60% of the total public transport market: the Kowloon Motor Bus (KMB), China Motor Bus (CMB), Mass Transit Railways (MTR) and Kowloon-Canton Railways (KCR). The KMB is franchised to provide bus services for Kowloon and the New Territories, while the CMB is franchised to provide bus services for Hong Kong Island. The MTR and KCR are semi-government owned railway com- panies that are run according to commercial principles, thus they need not consider the affordability of the urban poor to use their services. The MTR provides an underground mass railway service that is composed of three lines, namely, the Tsuen Wan, Kwun Tong and Island Lines. It provides higher income people with rapid and comfortable public transport services in the urban areas. The KCR is composed of a 34 km railway route linking Kowloon and the New Territories and eight Light Rail Transit (LRT) lines, and monopolizes the internal public transport services of Tuen Mun, Yuen Long and Tin Shiu Wai new towns. Figure 1 shows the main routes of public transport services and recent infrastructure development. The fare rises of the four public transport operators have always been higher than the rate of inflation and been criticized by pressure groups for the disadvantaged that the real wage-rise rate of low- income people cannot keep up with fare rises (eg, the real-wage rise of the manufacturing sector experienced negative growth in 1995) (see Table 1).

147


Table 1 Cumulative rise in fare rates of four public transport operators, inflation rise rates and real-wage indices from 1988 to 1995 (wage index, 1982 = 100)

1988 a 1990 a 1992 a 1994" 1995 b

Real wage rise of manufacturing 106.8 111.2 110.4 112 108.6 Inflation rate 100 119.8 149.8 158 166.7 KMB fare rise (%) 100 128 156 175 183 CMB fare rise (%) 100 131.5 152 166 NA KCR fare rise (%) 100 117 146 151 158 MTR fare rise (%) 100 113 138 160 167.8

Sources: Transport Department (1988-95), Public Transport in Hong Kong and Census and Statistics Department (1988-95), Quarterly Report on Wages. a Fare rise rates are based on weighted average of fare rises of the routes. b Based on various newspapers.

T h e i n f l u e n c e o f p u b l i c t r a n s p o r t o p e r a t i o n s o n t h e m o b i l i t y d e p r i v a t i o n o f t h e d i s a d v a n t a g e d

An in-depth interview survey was carried out in Janu- ary 1996 to explore the experience and feelings of 40 low-income people on mobility deprivation. All of them were captives of the public transport service and most of them were recipients of public assistance. The in-depth interviews lasted from 30 min to 2 h. Also, eight experts on transportation or social welfare were interviewed to provide information on setting the interview guidelines.

Eighty percent of the total cases of the disadvantaged expressed that the performance of public transport operations is an important mobility constraint for reaching their travel needs. According to the findings, the factors in public transport operations which have hindered disadvantaged groups from moving around freely are as follows: fare prices, concession fare policy, frequency, reliability, attitude of staff, network planning, district monopoly policy and facilities. These factors of public transport operations determine the travel patterns and mobility level of the disadvantaged, such as trip rate, modal choice and trip distance.

Even though there are variety of modal choices in public transport services, we can classify them into two types. The first type, such as taxis, MTR, KCR and LRT, are fast, comfortable, convenient and reliable, but their fares are too costly for the disadvantaged. The other type, such as trams and buses, are slow, unreliable and infrequent, and their networks are sometimes not allowed to compete with rail services, but their fares are affordable to the disadvantaged. Table 2 shows the findings of the modal choice of the 40 interviewees in the study, providing essential information on the performance of public transport services for the disadvantaged.

P u b l i c t r a n s p o r t f a r e s i n f l u e n c e m o b i l i t y

According to the findings of the study, the modal choice of the disadvantaged taking public transport services is greatly determined by the fare policy of

Table 2 The modal choice of public transport services in the study a

Urban area New towns Total cases

KMB 3 6 9 CMB 8 NA 8 MTR 5 6 11 KCR 0 2 2 Tramways 0 NA 0 LRT NA 8 8 Taxi 2 0 2 Total 18 22 40

a The interviewees were allowed to choose only one among seven modes of public transport service.

individual public transport operators. In the urban area, where buses were allowed to freely compete with train services, most of the interviewees chose bus services because they were cheaper than the MTR and taxis. Among 18 interviewees who lived in the urban areas, 11 chose either KMB or CMB to achieve their daily travel needs. Their main reason for this choice was that buses were affordable. Apart from taxis and the CMB, all public transport operators offered half fares for the elderly and the young during the time of the study. According to the Public Trans- port Guide 1995 (Transport Department, 1988-95), 23 CMB urban routes did not offer half fares to the young, or to both the elderly and young in their cross- harbour bus services. This caused confusion to the elderly who had impaired eyesight, since the cross- barbour bus routes were jointly supplied by CMB and KMB, with only KMB offering half fares to the elderly. Also, Miss Wong, a single mother living in an urban area, complained that the fares of air-conditioned bus services were too expensive for her, so that sometimes she had to wait a long time for non- air-conditioned buses because their fares were about 20% lower.

For those people living in the new towns, since buses were not allowed to compete with train services, many of the interviewees were forced to chose LRT and KCR as their modal choices. However, some of the disadvantaged interviewees complained

148


that the travel costs were unaffordable, especially for those who lived in new towns and work in the urban areas. For example, all single mothers who lived in new towns wanted the public transport operators to offer the same concessionary fares to them as offered the elderly and the young groups. They were even willing to take the risk of exposing their identities as single mothers if the public transport operators would consider their requests.

Frequency and staff attitudes

Regarding frequency and reliability of public transport services, most interviewees said the MTR and LRT provided a high degree of reliability and frequency. In the urban areas, three elderly interviewees, Mr Cheng, Mr Sezto and Mr Cheung, praised the services of the MTR as efficient and reliable. Concerning KCR services, Miss Fung, a single mother, said that the services were unreliable during peak hours, as the trains sometimes had to wait outside the stations pending signals to enter the stations. She noted that as the KCR could not meet the demand of the users during peak hours, the government needed another mass transit service to reduce the pressure of over- loading. Concerning bus services, Mr Mak said the CMB was far from satisfactory. He felt CMB provided a low-frequency service to unprofitable routes and provided those of a high frequency to cross-harbour routes because it could gain profits. Generally speaking, most interviewees experienced unreliable CMB and KMB services, which they understood might be due to increasing traffic congestion.

Concerning staff attitudes, most interviewees said that MTR and LRT staff behaved politely and con- siderately to the elderly. The blind and the elderly groups criticized some KMB and CMB drivers as inconsiderate, pointing out they did not always offer help to the disabled as they got on and off buses. Many interviewees who lived in Hong Kong Island complained that most of the CMB staff did not take a positive attitude toward their work, such as being friendly and helpful to elderly passengers.

Bus services not allowed to compete with rail in some new towns

The route design and network planning of public transport services did not consider the mobility needs of the disadvantaged, especially those lived in new towns. This failure of network planning was mainly due to unjust public transport policy which allows a train monopoly in some parts of the new towns, such as the monopoly of LRT in Yuen Long, Tuen Mun, Tin Shiu Wai in the northwest New Territories, and the monopoly of KCR services in Sheung Shui, Fan- ling and Tai Po in the northeast New Territories. As Table 2 shows, eight interviewees used LRT as the major modal choice for their daily travel needs. In

fact, most of them lived in the Tuen Mun district, where internal public transport services were monopolized by the LRT. Also, two interviewees used the KCR as their major public transport mode because they lived in Sheung Shiu, where the KCR monopolized the public transport service. This district monopoly does not consider the affordability level for the disadvantaged, especially for single mothers and other low-income interviewees, because the LRT and KCR fares were higher than buses. Besides, some elderly interviewees who lived a distance away from the LRT or KCR stations might regard necessary travel as hardship journeys. 12 interviewees lived in either Sha Tin or Tsuen Wan new towns, where population size was great enough that buses were allowed to compete with the MTR and KCR, six interviewees chose KMB as their major mode of transport, none the KCR, and six chose the MTR because they were not frequent users, and were attracted by the MTR's fast and efficient service.

Limited modal choice for wheelchair users

As Table 2 shows, two interviewees lived in urban areas and had to take taxis as their major modal choice because they were wheelchair users, and could not gain access to other public transport facilities, such as buses or trains. Apart from rehabus services, taxis were their only daily travel mode choice. How- ever, the high travel cost of taxis seriously reduced their mobility. Besides, according to the findings of the study, as KMB and CMB are main public transport modes for the elderly and the blind, these two public bus operators need to make some adjustments to their facilities to meet the mobility needs of these two disadvantaged groups, by, for example, enlarging the bus route signs, installing public address systems on each bus, lowering the steps of the existing buses, and enforcing a policy of reserving some seats for the handicapped and elderly during their journeys and locating fare boxes and buttons in a fixed position in all buses. Ten interviewees who lived Tuen Mun said that their basic need daily travel on public buses in urban areas were always plagued by traffic jams on the Tuen Mun highway. They suggested that the MTR or KCR should have a mass transit line to link Tuen Mun and Tsuen Wan built as soon as the government had realized the failure of self-containment of new towns in its town planning study.

Normative travel time

When we measure mobility, a normative travel time can be used to measure who suffers from mobility deprivation. It is clear that those people who take more than the normative travel time to travel to their basic needs are regarded as suffering from mobility deprivation. If there is a large number of people who cannot reach their basic needs within the normative

149


travel time, it is the obligation of the urban transport and town planners to take action to shorten their travel time to the normative travel time.

Seven of the eight expert interviewees advocated setting a normative travel time line for all people in Hong Kong. According to their views, for people who take public transport to reach their basic needs, the normative travel time should be below 1 h, including travel time, walking time and waiting time from home to the desired facility. The findings of the survey show that most of the interviewees who lived in new towns suffered from mobility deprivation (see Table 3). The long travel time also has some negative influence on the trip rate of the interviewees.

Besides, according to a study of 361 public transport services routes in the Public Transport Guides 1994-95 (Transport Department, 1988-95), including KMB, CMB, KCR, MTR and LRT, 49 public transport routes or 13.6% of the routes had travel times over 1 h, most of them were bus routes in new towns.

M o b i l i t y d e p r i v a t i o n c a u s e d b y f a i l u r e o f n e w t o w n p l a n n i n g

The urbanisation of Hong Kong and rapid population growth in the urban areas have forced the government to resettle the population to new towns. The town planners have originally followed the concept of the garden city proposed by Howard, who suggests new towns should follow the principle of self-contained communities for living and working (see Fig. 1). In 1996, about 2.8 million people have been resettled to new towns, over 70% of them living in government low-cost housing estates.

Even though the government has zoned land for manufacturing industry development in the new towns, there are only a few manufacturers relocating to them. Two factors which cause this mismatch between jobs and housing are: firstly, high production costs of manufacturing industries in Hong Kong, mainly due to wage and rent costs, force investors to move to China for cheap labour and land; and sec- ondly, the recent 'Opening Door Policy' of the Chi-

nese government has given manufacturers in Hong Kong a chance to find major 'backyard production centres' in southern Chinese cities (see Planning Department, 1993; FEER, 1995).

Relocation to China is mainly in a form of outpro- cessing. Manufacturers carry out the initial stages of production - such as designing, prototype production and material sourc ing- in Hong Kong, while shop floor production is done in China. Imports from and exports to China related to outward processing have increased significantly in recent years. At the same time, container-trnck traffic between China and Hong Kong is increasing remarkably also, which has caused traffic congestion in new towns. For example, the Tuen Mun highway has to support both the daily demand of new town people, and container-truck traffic between the container terminals in Tsuen Wan and the Pearl River Delta in China. In fact, the traffic congestion problem on the Tuen Mun highway has given rise to mobility deprivation to over 2 million people in the new towns (see Planning Department, 1994).

The mismatch between jobs and housing means the public transport service has to carry over 80% of new town residents for long distances every day to their places of work in the urban area where most of service industries are located. Table 4 is derived from the results of the travel characteristics survey by the government (Transport Department, 1993). In 1992, 2.4 million of the population lived in new towns while there was only employment for about 0.8 million available. The imbalance between jobs and population in the new towns implies that the urban area still remains the major employment and activity centre despite rapid new town development over the past 20 years.

M o b i l i t y d e p r i v a t i o n c a u s e d b y i n f r a s t r u c t u r e a n d l a n d - u s e d e v e l o p m e n t b e f o r e 1 9 9 7

The evidence of the study shows that to improve the performance of public transport operations, we must

Table 3 Average public transport travel time and trip rate by different social groups in the study

Disadvantaged group No. of cases Average travel time (min/trip - 1)c Trip rate Within urban areas New town to Low (%)b

urban areas High ( %)a

The elderly I 1 40 95 73 27 The young 10 45 48 70 30 Single mothers 5 30 60 40 60 Low income persons d 4 25 95 25 75 The handicapped 8 80 120 38 62 Occupational illness 2 NA 40 100 0 total number of cases 40

a A trip frequency of at least once a week is regarded as high-frequency. b A trip frequency of less than once a week is regarded as a low trip rate. c By the interviewees' estimation only, it includes trip time on the vehicle, walking and waiting time. d It includes those unemployed who are not on public assistance.

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Table 4 Population and employment 1973, 1981 and 1992 in Hong Kong

Area Population (000s) Employment (000s) 1973 1981 1992 1973 1981 1992

Hong Kong Island 991 1 216 I 221 489 705 790 Kowloon 2 412 2 616 1 946 918 1 171 1 057 Tsuen Wan New Town 329 620 693 138 299 308 Other new towns 459 805 1 700 171 287 418 Total 4 191 5 256 5 560 1 716 2 462 2 573

Source: Transport Department (1993).

first of all reduce travel time between the homes and desired facilities of the disadvantaged. It is the obligation of government decision-makers to ensure that this objective is top priority in the land-use development planning of Hong Kong. However, in the run up to 1997, the year in which the British government will hand over Hong Kong to China, urban land-use planners in have undertaken one of world's largest infrastructure projects: the port reclamation in Metro- plan, which involves port reclamation and housing a population of 1 million on the reclaimed land, and the Port and Airport Development Strategy (PADS), which involves a new airport, bridges, high-speed railways and container terminals (see Table 5). It is argued that these land-use planning projects will give rise to serious traffic congestion, and have a negative influence on the mobility of public transport users, because of the large size and monocentric city structure of Hong Kong (SCMP, 1996).

These PADS and Metroplan projects will have far- reaching implications on the daily mobility of people living in urban areas, in particular the disadvantaged. Since Hong Kong is a monocentric city with all business and financial activities concentrated in the urban centre, most of the travel is funnelled to the city centre during peak hours and causes serious congestion in urban areas. Besides, as the urban centre is densely populated, the government has had to invest in a high-capacity public transport system in the urban area, eg, the MTR. I f the government has no money to build such large infrastructure projects in the future, there will be serious traffic congestion, as in

the capital city of Thailand, Bangkok. Furthermore, Mills (1967) and Henderson (1983) pointed out that if the ci ty 's population is too large, it will cause consumption diseconomies, Henderson stated that:

there are consumption diseconomies connected with people clustering in urban areas, such as commuting cost increases in a monocentric city, which eventually offset the production scale benefits at the margin as city size increases... (p 164)

In fact, many papers on inefficieny in the urban systems of over-populated monocentric cities and on urban congestion have suggested some form of dis- persed city with more than one centre; hence, pol- icentric structures are suggested by many urban transportation planners to replace the monocentric city form (see Clark and Kuijpers-Linde, 1994). These urban city planning papers support the arguments of many critics in Hong Kong to develop a business and services centre in the northern New Territories instead of the reclamation project (see FEER, 1995). The additional 1 million people living on the reclaimed land together with the already high population density in the urban areas will ensure that the airport railway has enough demand to maintain a profit.

Apart from the PADS and Metroplan projects, the urban planners of Hong Kong have undergone two transportation projects to improve the accessibility of container terminals on the western coast of Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. The first project is the Route 3 highway, connecting Tuen Wan, Yuen Long and the Chinese border, which is scheduled for

Table 5 Recent land-use development planning in Hong Kong

Project Target completion date Cost US$ Major purpose

New airport core projects (not include airport 1998 railway) Airport railway (part of new airport core project) 1997 Port facilities: Container terminals 8, 9 and 1995-2011 terminals at Lantau Island (port reclamation of 1500 ha) Western Corridor Railway 2001

Country park section of Route 3 1999

17 billion

2.8 billion NA

10 billion

0.5 billion

Upgrade airport service in the southern China region To link the new airport and the urban areas For entrepot trade, to handle goods traffic between China and other countries

Freight and passenger service between the container ports in Hong Kong and China; to relieve traffic in new towns. Freight and passenger service between the container port and the Chinese border

Source: Hong Kong Bank (1994); various government reports.

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completion in 1999; the second project is the US$10 billion railway line, the Western Corridor Port Railway, which is proposed for completion by 2001. The primarily purpose is to improve accessibility between container terminals in Hong Kong and PRD. However, they will surely improve public transport operations by providing a higher level of mobility to the population in the northwest New Territories and will relieve traffic congestion on the Tuen Mun highway (Planning Department, 1993).

Urban land-use development planning in Hong Kong, such as Metroplan and PADS have clearly demonstrated that land-use planning decision-makers have put economic development as top priority and ignored social justice principles. A government town planning report highlights this point (Planning Department, 1994):

There is, however, a limit to which jobs can be decentralized to the New Territories due to the shift of the economy towards the service sector and the growing concentration of white collar jobs in the Metro Area. One option, therefore, would be to max- imize the development capacity of the Metro Area. (p 9)

Conclusion

This paper confirms the hypothesis that the performance of public transport operations in Hong Kong is a function of land-use, and socio-economic and urban transportation development. In the survey, it shows that the urban poor suffer from mobility deprivation because they are unable to afford the fares of public transport services; public urban transport planning, such as the privatization of the MTR and KCR, does not consider their travel needs. The failure of new town planning has imposed a heavy burden on the performance of public transport operations, because it has to provide more and longer routes to meet the decentralisation of the population. The PADS and Metroplan projects will cause serious traffic congestion in the urban areas, and as a result, public transport operation will fail to provide reasonable mobility to the disadvantaged. Town planners should put more effort into developing a business centre in the northern New Territories by providing office and commercial land space in the new towns, and building adequate infrastructure so that more investment and jobs would be attracted to the new towns as the city grows. Besides, after 1997, Hong Kong will certainly be integrated with the cities in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) to be a big economic zone in South-East Asia, a business centre near the PRD region is essential and feasible.

Finally, urban public transport p lanning will be improved if the government could carry out an open and democratic urban development p lanning policy so that all parties in society can take part in the planning process.

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