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Urban planning
OpinionComment
Dennis Lee
Dennis Lee

The View | To build Hong Kong into a green, low-traffic city, think beyond technology

  • If quality of life is to be improved and emissions cut, the city must have concrete plans to discourage private car ownership and create pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods
  • Examples in Europe, including financial hub London, offer ideas that are not restricted to technological solutions

Reading Time:4 minutes
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Pedestrians cross the road in Central in 2020. Other than a slogan of “walk more, ride less”, the latest Smart City Blueprint does not have a tangible proposal to reduce private car ownership and attendant pollution. Photo: Winson Wong
Dennis Lee

If a city is a living organism, roads and rail are the arteries, and vehicles are the red blood cells that carry oxygen to every tissue. From New York’s gridiron to Paris’ radial concentric city plan, traffic infrastructure is synonymous with urban planning. Streets, bridges, tunnels and subways not only connect different areas within a city, but also define district sizes, neighbourhood blocks and building plots, as well as how we travel and relate to our surroundings.

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Out of all the mobility choices, private cars offer the most comfort, choice and freedom. However, with the popularisation of car ownership, such personal freedom comes at a cost, including time lost in traffic deadlock and greenhouse gas emissions from internal combustion engines.
Hong Kong has close to 930,000 registered vehicles, of which more than 70 per cent are private cars, and transport accounts for 18 per cent of the city’s total carbon emissions. Yet, our leaders and lawmakers have never offered thorough solutions that would reduce private car ownership and the attendant pollution, instead putting forward trivial proposals, such as toll charges for high-traffic areas, congestion levies for cross-harbour tunnels and tax concessions for electric vehicles. These skin-deep measures treat the symptoms but not the disease.
Thanks to the advent of electric vehicles, cars running on fossil fuel could become relics in less than a generation. But electric vehicles are a transitional green solution at best. While they free us from petrol dependence, they would not be entirely environmentally responsible until we produce electricity exclusively by renewable means and completely recycle decommissioned lithium-ion batteries. Besides, the transition from fossil-fuel to electric vehicles does not decrease the number of cars on the road.

Since December 2017, the government has published two editions of the Smart City Blueprint, with various hi-tech transport initiatives.

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From a free-flow tolling system and an electronic road pricing pilot scheme, to traffic detectors, real-time adaptive traffic signal systems, trials of autonomous vehicles and a real-time parking app, some of the initiatives – if fully implemented – could help motorists avoid congestion, shorten travel times, and offer consumers convenience and data-centric solutions.

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