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COMMUNICATIONS AND TRANSPORT
The Star Ferry Company runs a passenger ferry service across the harbour between Central District on Hong Kong Island and Tsim Sha Tsui on the southern tip of Kowloon. The company uses 10 vessels on this service with a total passenger- carrying capacity of 5,600. Supplementary services are operated during the daily rush-hour traffic. A total of 51 million passengers were carried during 1973, a decrease of eight per cent over the previous year, because of the cross-harbour tunnel and the introduction of cross-harbour bus services.
Administration
The Transport Advisory Committee, formed in 1965, has a membership of four official and six unofficial members, with one unofficial as its chairman. It advises the Governor on all aspects of transport and traffic_policy, with the exception of external sea and air communications.-
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The Transport Department provides a secretariat for the Transport Advisory Committee and carries out a wide range of executive functions including vehicle licensing, driving tests and vehicle inspection. As the statutory authority, the Com- missioner for Transport is also responsible for planning and regulating public trans- port services and co-ordinating action between other departments in the transport field.
Licensing
The number of registered motor vehicles at the end of 1973 was 202,775, an increase of 8.9 per cent over the previous year (vehicle statistics are given in Appendix 35). Registrations of new private cars remained at a high level. This resulted in a net increase in private car registrations of 8,584 during 1973, compared to 14,851 in 1972.
Demand for driving licences dropped significantly during the year, largely as a result of an increase in fees on March 1. Driving licence fees rose from $10 to $50 a year, provisional driving licence fees from $40 to $100 a year, and driving test application forms from $20 to $150. At the end of 1972, there were 191,952 candidates awaiting driving tests. By the end of 1973, this had been reduced to 32,202. During the year 182,055 tests were conducted.
Congestion
Traffic conditions continued to get worse during 1973, with the number of motor vehicles on Hong Kong's roads increasing by 8.9 per cent to 202,775, representing 318 vehicles to every mile of road. The number of licensed drivers increased by 9.4 per cent to 455,061. Massive road improvements are also in hand or are being planned. However, the geography of Hong Kong places strict limitations on the amount of new road space that can be provided for vehicle circulation, particularly within the urban areas, and it was announced during the year that the government had decided to go ahead with the mass transit railway.
As road congestion increases, public transport becomes less efficient, because it loses mileage through disrupted schedules and delays in frequency. As public transport