HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL —————— 2 November 1988
香港立法局 一九八八年十一月二日
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results in a waste of public funds. Will Government inform this Council whether such undesirable situations are the result of poor project planning and a lack of proper co-ordination among various government departments concerned, and what improvement measures are in hand to rectify such situations?
SECRETARY FOR LANDS AND WORKS: Sir, our highways have to perform a dual role; they are a route for vehicles and pedestrians, and, less obviously the space in which our essential utility services are installed. The two functions obviously conflict, especially in the urban area where most of the streets are too narrow and buildings exceptionally dense.
On average 100 new road openings are started every working day, of which, again on average, some 80% are planned and their implementation co- ordinated by the Highways Regional Road Opening Co-ordinating Committees. These committees incidentally include representatives of all the public utility bodies that is Water Supplies Department, electricity companies, gas company and telephone company, and will, I suppose in future, have to include the cable television people. Even planned excavation is disruptive, but this planning and co-ordination do, we believe, mitigate the disruption to traffic and reduce the inconvenience to the public. For instance where there is more than a single application for excavation along a street or a traffic route, the co-ordinating committee will argue the balance of disruption between several excavations for a shorter period on the one hand and an extended period of excavations in series on the other. But in any case some 20% of excavations are emergency openings and these, imposed on top of the planned openings may sometimes seem to negate much of the co-ordination. But broken or breaking utilities must be repaired and I can only say that without the co-ordination the situation would be infinitely worse.
Sir, the last time the problem of road excavations was raised in this Council I said that I intended to re-examine the proposals originally examined in the context of Tuen Mun New Town development for the common ducting of utilities. These had then been rejected because of the additional cost of what would in most cases have to be a very substantial tunnel, and because of the incompatibility of certain different types of utility. It seemed moreover inevitable that excavations would still be involved for utility connections from the ducts to buildings. When we looked at the problem again, these problems still seemed intractable, and in any case in the new towns it has been found possible to direct a substantial number of the utilities into amenity strips, so that the excavations become a temporary environmental rather than a traffic and an environmental problem. There is no possibility of any fundamental