The review pointed to the extent to which taxis had been increasing. In 1978, the year before the White Paper was published, the number of passengers carried by taxis represented 11.5% of the number of passengers carried by all forms of public transport, but by June 1983 this proportion had increased to 16.6%. Taxis were therefore eating into the patronage of public transport mass carriers when the policy was exactly the opposite and the effectiveness of the Government's measures against congestion had been "seriously undermined by continuing to put more taxis on the road". In response to the Taxi Review the Government in January 1984 accepted that there should be a freeze on the number of taxis but by this time the total number of taxis in Hong Kong had nearly doubled from 8,700 in 1979, when the White Paper was published, to 15,800 in 1984. However, a 24% fare increase recommended by the Transport Advisory Committee was rejected in favour of only an 11% increase. With such a large supply of taxis, which in 1984 carried nearly as many passengers as the whole of the Mass Transit Railway system and about twice as many passengers as private cars, the prospect of using taxi control measures to reduce traffic congestion as set out in the White Paper was severely weakened. The level of taxi fares is now lower in real terms than it was in 1979 when the White Paper stressed the importance of increasing them.
103.
The implementation of the Government's policy on parking suffered from the same uncertainties as the taxi policy with decisions sometimes being made in isolation from other aspects of transport policy. The White Paper recognized that the supply of parking spaces and the charges for them were crucial in controlling road use by private cars and the Working Group on Parking Policy accepted the principle that discouraging all-day, off-street car parking by increasing parking charges was consistent with the Government's overall transport policy of relating the provision of parking spaces to the capacity of adjacent roads. The Working Group's report was issued in March 1981 and one of its most important recommendations was that:
"Parking facilities in a particular area must be
provided at a price which ensures that the demand for parking in that area is in balance with the supply, which must itself be determined by the ability of the surrounding roads to handle the traffic generated".