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on the Kowloon side of the harbour, and the proposed Wan Chai reclamation on the Hong Kong Island side. The tunnel will contain four lanes for traffic and will be approximately 13 miles in length. The company is to construct the tunnel, while the approaches to it will be built by the Public Works Department. Vehicles using the tunnel will pay a toll.
The decision to go ahead with the tunnel gave final form to an idea which had been considered from time to time since 1902. In a preliminary planning report in 1948 the late Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the well known town planner, referred to the need for a cross-harbour road link. Six years later the government appointed a firm of consulting engineers to report on the project, and subsequently an inter-departmental working party—reporting on the implications-concluded that the government should not itself build the necessary link. In 1956 the government accepted the recommendation of the working party and added that it was prepared to consider privately sponsored schemes, either for a bridge or a tunnel.
In 1957 and again in 1959 the government agreed to delay develop- ment in a part of the Morrison Hill area on Hong Kong Island, where a bridge might have terminated, while investigations for a bridge went ahead. In 1961 the Victoria City Development Company submitted very full reports and traffic analyses of the scheme on which it had been working. These were examined at great length and in 1963 the government came to the conclusion that while a bridge was unacceptable a tunnel was unobjectionable. At the same time the question as to whether the scheme should be put to tender or not was considered. For seven years the government offer to consider such schemes had been open, but no other scheme had been taken to a stage where there were any sponsors prepared to pursue it. Under these circumstances the government decided in 1963 that the scheme should not be put to tender, but that a franchise with the Victoria City Development Company would be negotiated and that the sponsors should have up to 31st March, 1964, to decide whether to proceed. By the end of 1965 both government and private planning was well in hand to meet the anticipated require- ments of the draft legislation connected with the cross-harbour tunnel.
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