HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
香港立法局
————————一九八九年七月十二日
12 July 1989
99
designated off-peak hours will be given to service vehicles. Through traffic would bypass or skirt around these areas.
Sir, Mrs. Selina CHOW, whose view I share, would like to reiterate her call to guard against injustice towards private car ownership. She recognizes the need to manage road usage properly, but disagrees with any physical measures to control ownership such as vehicle taxation. She is, however, in support of such means as access control, fuel tax and area pricing which are all related to road usage.
While we want to discourage the use of private cars on the road to conserve road use, we must find other convenient and attractive means for those people who are used to travel by cars. People want to travel from one place to another in as continuous a manner as possible. If his travel involves different modes of public transport, then the intermodal connection should be smooth and efficient. Thus, I welcome the recommendation that more and better interconnections between the Kowloon-Canton Railway and the Mass Transit Railway should be planned. Likewise, transfers from bus to rail systems should be equally efficient.
Given the proven advantages of the rail systems as reliable off-road mass carriers, I endorse the proposal to expand rail services so that they will take care of more and more of the public transport needs in Hong Kong. In fact, the Green Paper suggested that by 2001, the rail systems will take a major share of public transport. On this, I have a few observations.
1. I do not agree with the Green Paper's suggestion in paragraph 129 that "the 'park-and-ride' method is unlikely to be effective in Hong Kong because most of the commuting distances are too short". I fail to understand why, just to take one example, a public car park cannot be built near the Choi Hung Mass Transit Railway Station so that private car drivers can take the Mass Transit Railway for onward journey. The Green Paper suggested one of the obstacles for the "park-and-ride" method is that parking charges are usually high. In the same paragraph, it also said that the "park-and-ride" method will impose additional burden on the already congested rail corridors along the peak periods. I find that these arguments are hard to accept for the cost of carparks can offset capital costs of road construction, and if the rail system is inadequate, then more lines should be economically viable.