Bury me in a Y-shaped channel: Lantau Tomorrow traffic jams to be hydrogen-powered
and progress on Soho ped scheme, Labour Dept being useless, a non-story about blood
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Govt proposes hydrogen facilities for Lantau artificial islands
Good news: the traffic jams on the Lantau Tomorrow artificial island project will be mostly hydrogen and electric, according to the government’s latest policy plan.
Development Bureau unveiled its blueprints for the three-island Y-shaped mega-town while gently asking LegCo for more money – the artificial islands will cost now $580 billion instead of $500 billion1 – and revealing "smart mobility" to be one of many buzzword pillars of KYCAI's2 development.
The govt says the project will now include "facilities for electric vehicles and other new energy vehicles such as hydrogen", confirming fears that this massive boondoggle in the Lantau waters will be based around the general "vehicles first" approach of Hong Kong development3.
To be fair to the government, there’s not a single car on any of the renderings, including renderings of one of the bridges between two of the islands, so you might say “electric and hydrogen vehicles” refer only to public transport. But that’s a dangerous assumption to make.
In fact, the entire project is more of a road project than a housing project, completing a ring road to connect Shenzhen and the HK-Macao-Zhuhai Bridge.
And while last year a junior minister claimed the whole project could be "car free", that delightful notion was very quickly quashed by Development Bureau, who said there might instead be "car-free" areas. This week's policy paper confirms the concept. Obviously there’s major roads going in and out, and while there will be seven “15 minute neighbourhoods”, it’s going to take a lot of lobbying to keep cars from being the main transport between and into those seven hoods.
The nod to hydrogen is new, though, and raises many questions. Looking at the neat little map provided by the government, all the "utilities" are on the north-eastern shore, tucked away like a SimCity power plant. But in reality, how would urban hydrogen facilities look? Hydrogen be piped into every building and car park like Towngas? Or will there just be a couple of hydrogen filling stations for buses? Or did they just mention hydrogen because it's trendy and will distract the few sane lawmakers left from asking any real questions like WHY THE HELL ARE WE ALLOWING CARS ON THE ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS ANYWAY?
The government’s pet consultants Arup have ignored even studying the feasibility of a bike lane on the new road from Hong Kong Island to the new town, and while there's a few nods to cycling in the KYCAI, it's localised and unconnected.
The problem with the whole thing is the naked ambition of the government to be building a massive portal into mainland China (see also: Northern Metropolis). The latest document released this week claims they want "15 minute neighbourhoods" in the same paragraph as a "DOUBLE GATEWAY TO THE WORLD". And look, there's nothing wrong with either approach but you can't build a DOUBLE GATEWAY TO THE WORLD and pretend it's a folksy Lo So Shing-style fishervillage. You end up with something like Fisherman’s Wharf meets Wedding Card Street4 and has a threesome with Terminal 2.
Car-free Sunday Soho: consensus emerges on Soho pedestrian plan
It's taken a year of talk but some sort of consensus on a Soho pedestrianisation has taken shape in the last few days. Hitherto, restaurateurs and bar owners have been rather down on the idea, while friends of Elodie Ma (the woman tragically killed by a runaway car on Peel Street) and yours truly have been demanding more action. But conversations sparked by the anniversary of Ma's death revealed some keen support for day-time Sunday pedestrianisation, solving the problem of the late-nite "7-11 bar" stealing restaurant business and allowing some experimentation in timing and routes to improve the district. Watch this space: Transport Dept's excuse, so far, has been they don't have the support of the local businesses. But with Richard Feldman (who owns the fab Al's Diner among others) and the Soho Association behind it, we could be seeing car-free Sunday Soho within months5.
Toothless Labour Dept "reminds" law-breaking contractor not to kill people
Long story but I found myself in the "Fatal File" room of the To Kwa Wan Government Offices, despairing at the government’s pathological avoidance of doing any serious prosecution work where dodgy construction sites are involved.
The investigator looking into claims of dangerous work practices at a construction site in Kowloon Tong said he had visited the site and found a number of violations, including I-beams not stacked properly (which has, IIRC, caused at least one if not two worker deaths in recent months).
But they're not prosecuting them. They simply "reminded" the contractors to shape up. Meanwhile they're deposing me like some sort of villain (for HOURS6) because I sent them a photo of the worksite and they claim they cannot prosecute without my complete cooperation and sworn statements etc.
The worst thing is, I KNOW the long slow interviews (which could be done by one email), are a tactic to reduce civilian complaints, and yet it works. I probably won't go back for the second two-hour stretch because, well, I'm not that hopeful they'll even be able to get a prosecution on the back of my blurry photos. The whole point of sending it in was to alert them to the dangers and have them swoop in and sort it out, not to produce court-worthy evidence and do their job for them.
Meanwhile in a similar vein a HK Police Force sergeant rang me to say he couldn't prosecute a driver driving through a crossing on green man (with video I'd sent in) because there was no evidence he'd driven through a red light and cars are not bound by pedestrian signals. He asked if he should call the driver with a "serious warning" or could he drop the case? I requested he drop it – the warnings are not recorded or cumulative, and are therefore completely worthless. If anything, such a phone scolding would probably embolden the driver that there really are no consequences to his dangerous driving.
A non-story as I slowly bleed...
The government's running out of human blood, with only a few days' supply remaining. In desperation, Hospital Authority has axed the 25-year-rule which had stopped donations from those who've lived in Mad Cow Disease countries – so yesterday, I gave blood for the first time in Hong Kong.
Of course I did a little research into the transport angle while trying not to look at the needle: could we save blood by reducing traffic crashes? 'Fraid not, it seems not to have a big impact. Only 10% of donated blood is used in trauma/A&E (90% is for medical and surgical). And given road crashes only account for a fifth of A&E cases7 , reducing road crashes to even zero probably won't make a huge difference to the blood banks. Hate it when a scoop fizzles out in a pool of its own data 🤣
Transit Jam headlines
“DO NOT USE BICYCLES IN URBAN AREAS” SAYS GOVT, CITING “ROAD SAFETY” RISKS
WOMAN, 27, KILLED IN HIGH-SPEED CLEARWATER BAY SMASH
HK ELECTRIC COMES OUT SWINGING FOR URBAN CYCLING, IN DEFIANCE OF LONG-STANDING GOVT POLICY
TWO KILLED AS BUS DRIVER PLOUGHS INTO UNPROTECTED ROADSIDE CLEANING CREW
PEDESTRIAN DANGERS UNCHANGED ONE YEAR AFTER SOHO WOMAN’S DEATH
MOTORCYCLIST KILLS 73-YEAR-OLD PEDESTRIAN ON NATHAN ROAD CROSSING
Hong Kong road safety
Weekly crash stats: Monday 12 Dec to Sunday 18 Dec, 2022
Traffic crashes: 751
Traffic crashes with injury: 176
Weekly average crashes with injury: 277 (2022 to end Oct)
Dashcam of the Week
So many shocking cams this week: perhaps the worst was the footage of the brazen daylight kidnapping outside a prison, with two CSD officers putting up the most pathetic defence since top cop Fred Choi claimed his brothel was not a vice establishment.
But a kidnapping recorded on a phone is not technically a dash cam, so, for your regular brazen idiot driving… there’s nothing like a brace of Tesluns having trouble with pedestrian crossings!
obviously it's going to cost well over $1 trillion in reality but nobody wants to tell the truth at this early stage lest lawmakers are tardy in their rubber-stamping.
It’s been renamed from Carrie Lam’s awkward “Lantau Tomorrow Vision” to the “Kau Yi Chau Artificial Islands”, KYCAI, very much more in keeping with John Lee’s style.
Park Island being the only genuine car-free development. Lamma Island no longer counts given the proliferation of noisy “Village Vehicles” (VVs) driven at dangerous speeds and without care for VV restrictions, they might as well be dual-plated Alphards.
A luxury residential development disguised as a “public” street of awful shops and over-priced restaurants and a CONSTANTLY BLOCKED PAVEMENT from cherry-pickers putting up or taking down some sort of festive decorations. Like it was in the contract, “there must always be a cherry-picker on site putting up or taking down decorations”.
jk, years, probably before Lantau Tomorrow is built in 2045 at least.
seriously the whole process will be about four hours.
it's hard to get data on A&E incident types so I used known A&E death casues as a proxy for visits, assuming all A&E visits have the same death rate (which is obviously not ideal but good enough for a rough idea)