Hong Kong's Future is Guided by Transit Infrastructure

Abstract

Hong Kong is a maritime metropolis with 6.7 million inhabitants, very little land and one of the highest population densities in the world. The postwar cityscape can best be described as a forest of skyscrapers standing against mountains. Skyscrapers are the most common structure because they offer an excellent ratio of volume to surface area. With its small land area and large population, Hong Kong shows the symptoms of a metropolis whose transit network must deal with burdensome constraints. Because of the need to coordinate massive passenger flows, make scarce and expensive land profitable, and cope with the weight of excessive centralization of business activities, the Hong Kong government has continued to promote greater accessibility for more than 30 years. This goal, which is complex, but can create added value, is common and vital to every metropolis wishing to maintain its status within the community of major world cities. Hong Kong’s reputation and economic weight stem from its global-trade and service sectors, the latter being responsible for 89% of current GDP. The creative nature and effectiveness of government development projects depend on their ability to form multiple links within the metropolis. In Hong Kong, modernization of the transit network requires a coordinated mastery of passenger movement, whether local, regional or global, especially since tourism, which depends partly on the quality of services and transportation, is Hong Kong’s second largest income source after commerce. By the late 1990s, Hong Kong had introduced a wide array of new and significant transportation infrastructure and equipment. These include Chek Lap Kok Airport on Lantau Island, the Kowloon intermodal station and the Tsing Ma bridge. Other major facilities and structures are still in the planning stage. One important development was the movement of the international airport from the city centre to the outskirts, which involved realigning the city’s transit corridors (see JRTR 19, pp. 36–43). In the long term, it will likely change the configuration of the urban centres too. In addition to modernization of the transit network, the change in the airport’s location has offered the city new development opportunities, through redevelopment of the 230 ha of vacated airport land and through urban growth promoted by denser use of new interconnecting transit nodes and by the development of additional reclaimed land. Working together, the government and leading transit operators have succeeded in seizing this opportunity to raise Hong Kong to the status of an important 21st-century metropolis. Construction of Chek Lap Kok Airport was accompanied by several major rail and road projects aimed at establishing direct, rapid connect ions f rom the new international gateway to the city centre. In addition, some lots near the new railway stations were earmarked for their high potential as sites for future urban development adjacent to the new rail corridors. The most innovative of these developments, the new urban district of Tung Chung (originally expected to accommodate 180,000 inhabitants near the airport), has taken advantage of its new accessibility and now represents part of the drive for more balanced population densities by moving urban development westward from the saturated central core.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.