They dice with death every day on Hong Kong’s streets, the elderly with their trolleys piled high – and most of us ignore them
- We see them. And we blank them. Now six photographers have made the invisible visible, turning their lenses on rubbish collectors and other trolley pushers
- They answered a call from Designing Hong Kong to illustrate the plight of the ‘wheel-walkers’, seven of whom have been killed in traffic accidents in a decade
If your life currently feels dull – if you’re fed up with Netflix, video games, NFTs and bitcoin – there’s a place in Hong Kong where you can watch actual humans dicing with death. It’s in Sheung Wan, on the footbridge behind the Wing On department store.
From this vantage point, you will observe a stream of people below trying to cross four lanes of traffic. They’re on foot, they’re not young and each of them is pushing a trolley piled, stinkingly high, with rubbish.
Why did the rubbish collector cross the road? To get to the other side – because that’s where the Man Kat Refuse Collection Point is hidden under the Connaught Road Central footbridge, next to Harbour Building.
Although there are stairs and lifts, these were not designed with trolleys in mind. In other words, it’s impossible for the collection point to serve its actual purpose unless those who supply it take on the traffic.
I thought, how can I communicate the feeling that these people are in the city, right next to other people who don’t care about them?
Judging by several afternoons spent watching this operation – the trek from Infinitus Plaza to beyond – there’s a knack: creep along the edge, step into a split-second space and hope for the best. Not everyone survives.
Every day all over the city, refuse gatherers and their trolleys face off against the city’s traffic, and in past decade seven people pushing their carts have died in 12 serious accidents, says Designing Hong Kong. In 2017 it launched its “Walking with Wheels” (WWW) initiative.
