LOOPHOLE 63: CLUELESS COPS INVITE DRIVER DECEPTION
Plus triads attack a friend, and the govt shrugs off park smokers
Welcome to the Transit Jam weekly newsletter, all the good stuff which didn’t fit on the website plus scroll down for the headlines, road safety stats and Dashcam of the Week! Please share with your colleagues and friends, and consider a paid subscription to support Transit Jam’s independent journalism, thanks, James.
“That wasn’t me, officer”…
A telling exchange in LegCo yesterday when the government revealed police have no data on how many drivers have escaped conviction through "Loophole 63", an easy cheat whereby the vehicle owner claims ignorance about who was driving at the time of an incident.
Section 63(1) of the Road Traffic Ordinance offers a handy escape route for lawbreakers: if a vehicle owner says they do not know who was driving at a specific time, they'll get at worst a small fine (around $2,000) and any legal proceedings will likely be dropped.
In yesterday’s Council Meeting, Transport sector lawmaker Frankie Yick demanded Loophole 63 figures from the government. Yick was asking in the context of Uber crash victims: there have been cases, he says, where victims of crashes involving ride-hailing vehicles have failed to get any compensation after vehicle owners have invoked the loophole and lied about knowing who's at the wheel1.
Yick had requested detailed information on the number of cases where Loophole 63 had been applied, the sorts of cases involved and how many cases were simply dropped after owners told police.
The answer from Secretary for Transport Lam Sai-hung shouldn't surprise anyone who knows our police force2. "The Police does not maintain statistics of demanding for driver's information in accordance with section 63(1) of the Ordinance, the number of convictions for violating the provision, as well as the number of cases where the investigations were discontinued as a result."
In other words, they don't have the first clue how common this is, how many people are escaping conviction and whether there's a pattern in the types of cases involved.
Yick just told me the trade is not happy with the government’s response. “People in the trade that I represent were not satisfied with Secretary Lam’s response yesterday. If our government’s enforcement actions are effective, there won’t be so many illegal hiring […] on the road, particularly at the border,” he said.
Police can, in theory, do some investigation and find out who was behind the wheel in case of crash or injury. But they rarely do. I've personally come across it dozens of times in submitted dangerous driving videos. In one case, where the driver of a huge truck lugging a pre-fabricated apartment reversed illegally into and down Mosque Street, the construction company was fined just $1,000 for failing to disclose the driver at the time (it would have been a careless driving charge otherwise) but all other cases where the driver couldn't be identified were simply dropped.
In the UK, such trickery comes at a steep cost to the vehicle owner: not only a ~HK$10,000 fine but also six penalty points on the owner's driving licence (half way to a six-month driving ban). A local police force shared a story on Twitter, where five people in a pulled-over car refused to tell a police officer who'd actually been driving: all five occupants were slapped with the fine and the penalty points!
Yick seems to be calling for the loophole to be plugged in such a manner, with a stiffer sentence and driving licence penalties for failing to disclose a driver. But Secretary Lam didn't give any indication the government was considering this, with a non-answer along the usual lines of "we will continue to review the related provisions from time to time". Bureaucrat-speak for "we're fine, thanks". Good news for motorists and criminals, bad news for road safety.
Did triads send a message to “clean” minibus firm?
Talking of Loophole 63, a car owner tried to use it to hide the identity of a violent triad who attacked a minibus driver in broad daylight last week. Police, to their credit, didn't accept the brush-off (probably as the case was all over the internet and reporters were asking lots of questions) and arrested the vehicle owner for interfering with an investigation. "Officers believed that the arrested man allowed the driver to drive his private car knowing that the driver did not hold a driving licence, and assisted the private car driver to escape from the police", said a police statement.
At first glance the dispute itself seemed like a typical angry traffic dispute. But then I recognised the driver: no ordinary bus uncle, he's Franki Li, founder of AN Bus and a young entrepreneur who wants to clean up the red minibus business. I interviewed him back in June 2020: he was the first to introduce Whatsapp booking for seats and developed an online seat booking system with some pretty nifty tech. He also set up PayMe and Octopus for passengers to pay fares, a first for red minibuses. When I interviewed him, we skirted around the triad issue: you still have to respect the brothers, he'd said, but that was part of the red minibus business.
To be clear, Li yesterday told me the dispute with the angry triad who attacked him was purely a "traffic matter". He also said he didn't want to talk about it further. And so, as much as I hate using question marks in a headline, there's no evidence this was actually a triad issue other than “triad being an aggressive a-hole” issue.
But given triad involvement in so many transport fields (including brazen daylight theft of public parking spaces and protection rackets on many minibus routes), you don't need an over-active imagination or tinfoil hat to ask if this was in fact some sort a warning to Li and AN Bus. Clean, transparent business is obviously not conducive to criminal enterprise and a red minibus firm taking electronic payment and keeping solid records must surely be ruffling a few feathers.
Govt could care less about park smokers
It's no exaggeration to say every trip to an LCSD park or playground with my kids in 2022 featured someone smoking in the non-smoking area. Smoking in the park or harbourfront is endemic, sad to say, and half the time it's staff doing the smoking. I've raised this a dozen times with LCSD (and the useless TACO, and the useless Ombudsman). The government usually wriggles out of it, claiming the alleged smokers are not government staff or even government contractors. But this week, a clear photo of an uniformed DevB contractor smoking in a non-smoking area elicited an outstanding response: the worker was "taking a break at the material time" and, while breaking the law, his behaviour was not the government's problem, case closed.
Transit Jam headlines
A TAXING WALK NO MORE: GOVT WILL ADD GREEN MAN CROSSING OUTSIDE NEW TAX BUILDING
GOVT CLAMPS DOWN ON ITS HARBOURFRONT BIKE TRIAL CONTRACTOR, ADMITS “DEFECTIVE BIKES”
PEDESTRIAN KILLED UNDER MEGABOX FOOTBRIDGE
11-YEAR-OLD GIRL RUN DOWN ON STREET, 7-SEATER DRIVER ARRESTED
“TOO MUCH CONGESTION FOR NUMBERPLATE RECOGNITION TO WORK”: GOVT
91-YEAR-OLD MAN KILLED CROSSING ROAD ON TAI WAI ESTATE
INLAND REVENUE: PEDESTRIAN SAFETY AT NEW $3.6BN OFFICES “NOT OUR PURVIEW”
Hong Kong road safety
Weekly crash stats: Monday 2 Jan to Sunday 8 Jan, 2023
Traffic crashes: 530
Traffic crashes with injury: 144
Weekly average crashes with injury: 280 (2022 to end Nov)
Dashcam of the Week: Border Opening edition
The borders have opened, we haven't seen a mad crush on the East Rail Line yet, but in honour of our new-found north-south freedom here's a great cam from Shanghai: a man angry with a hotel's response to the loss of his laptop drove his car around the lobby.
And back home, an angry truck driver has no shame for blocking the road and threatens those who complain about it. When it comes to meth, some people say less is more. This truck driver is not one of those people.
And of course the majority of Ubers on the road have no proper insurance, something Uber shamefacedly and repeatedly lies about. If you are involved in any sort of crash with a non-Hire Car Permit Uber, get as much cash/compensation as you physically can on the scene because that's all you're ever going to see
Tangentially, I email traffic police every few months to remind them they spell "statistics" wrong on the police website but the mistake remains to this day. I mention this rather than simply say “Hong Kong police can’t even spell statistics” just to be clear how awful at statistics they really are.