Geography and the Environment in Southeast Asia: Proceedings of the Geology Jubilee Symposium, The University of Hong Kong, 21-25 June 1976

7. Transport and the Environment: Hong Kong Transport and the Metro

VII TRANSPORT AND THE ENVIRONMENT: HONG KONG TRANSPORT AND THE METRO T.M. Ridley There is no generally agreed definition of 'the environment'. Norma11y something is considered to be ‘bad for the environment' if an individual is adversely affected by a new development, whereas the 加lpact of existing facihties is frequently ignored. Transport is somewhat easier to define, being the movement of people and goods from one place to another. We often think of transport and the environment in terms of specifics. Fumes from buses are ‘bad for the environment'; the visual intrusion of an elevated highway is ‘bad for the environment'; and the noise of traffic is ‘bad for the environment'. These are not unimportant examples of the impact of transport, but the reality of the interrelationship between transport and the environment, and of the decisions to be taken by professionals and politicians, is much wider than the ex前nples would indicate. The most fundamental questions relate to the advantages and disadvantages of different combinations of transport facilities, since virtually every facility can be shown to have some disadvantages . It has now become fashionable in some countries to require an environmenta1 impact study, in addition to the traditional analysis of a project, before it is allowed to proceed. Indeed, in some places, such a study has replaced the comprehensive transport study and cost benefit analysis as the cruciaI tool which the decision-maker purports to use before he reaches his subjective decision about a project. Environmental impact studies may be desirable, indeed essenti祉， but they are Iikely to be even more expensive and cause more delay in the decision-making process than either comprehensive transport studies or cost benefit analyses. In fairness, examples can be found where this is. not true. If the engineelS who were designing the raillink from the Channel tunnel to central 80 T.M. RIDLEY London and the freeway system for San Francisco had given earlier consideration to the environmental impact of those projects, they would either have proceeded more quickly or been cancelled mOre quickly. Either of these courses would have been an improvement over the protracted public debates which ended in cancellation. If an examination of environmental impact is to be carried out, it is not enough to look at a single project and merely list its disadvantages. It is essential to examine alternative pl甜s and courses of action,to compare the advantages and disadvantages of each, and particularly to consider the costs involved. But, as. with cost benefit analy郎， a major difficulty exists: there is no sunple number or single criterion which produces the 'right answer'. The real questions which arise are political and are concerned,in the widest sense, with who pays and who benefits. It is of no value to build a major road system, however large the actual and theoretica1 benefits when compared with costs, if one sector of the community obtains all the benefits from the increased mobility provided while another sector bears all the environmental costs and disadvantages. Who, for example, speaks for the pedestrians of Hong Kong? The Hong Kong government has decided that there shall be a Mass Transit Railway (Metro) which the Corporation, formed in September 1975, will build and operate. The decision to proceed with the Modified Initial System followed many years of analysis by the g的 ernmer此， which fortunately recognized the enormous transport problem ahead. A5 in 50 many major cities in the world, factors unrelated to transport combined to produce a deteriorating situation - an increasing population and an increasing standard of living in addition to the already very high density of the urban area, the congestion of the roads, and the overcrowding of cxisting tran5port facilities. These factors, together with the fact that topography and density severely restrict the amount of additional road building that is possible in the urban area of Hong Kong, led the government to decide that there must be a si伊i­ ficant increase in public transport capacity. This could only be achieved if the Mass Transit Railway were built. The full system proposed (Figure 7. 1) is some 50 km in length, while at the present time the Corporation is engagtld m building the 15.6 km Modified Initial System (Figure 7. 2). Of thi5, 12.8 km will be underground and 2.8 km ele TRANSPORT AND ENVIRONMENT "訟IN .鶴N W‘雪， (lJ HONG KONG A且A囂S ，aANSI' 聾AILWAY FULL SYSTEM p...