A COMPLETELY NEW PORT
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world will depend in the future, as now and in the past, on how shrewdly and far-sightedly this asset is exploited.
Hong Kong's eminence as a financial, communications and manufacturing centre is rooted in its pre-eminence as a port, presently one of the two busiest in the world. Its prime clients are the world's shippers, traders and manufacturers. If their needs are correctly anticipated and efficiently met, the city will thrive. If they are not, it will decline.
The Grand Design
As Hong Kong entered the second half of the 1980s, those concerned with its future territorial development had to take account of two certain prospects.
The first certainty was that over the closing decade of this century and the opening decade of the next one, the volume of cargo that the port would have to handle would increase substantially. No figure could then be set on the likely rate of growth, but the trends clearly pointed well beyond a level at which the privately operated container port at Kwai Chung, even with new terminals added to it, could cope with the demand.
The second certainty was that an equally pressing increase in air traffic would exceed the capacity of Kai Tak Airport, already under strain, by the mid-1990s. The desirability of a new airport was hardly in doubt. But where, when and how to build it (and whence the funding would come) were then unanswerable questions. There was also a more central and overriding concern: how to avoid a costly and perilous divergence of effort as answers and solutions were sought for the port and the airport respectively.
This last concern led to the birth of the process-cum-operation now known familiarly as 'PADS' - yesterday's investigation, today's Grand Design. The initials stand of course for the Port and Airport Development Strategy; but in effect the PADS acronym carried a second 'S' (for Studies) up till the day when the government made its final decision on the options which the planners were charged with devising.
Work on the PADS studies began in mid-1987 and in March 1988 the overall brief for the teams engaged on them was spelled out. Their task was to produce recommended strategic options that would:
meet the forecast port and air traffic growth in Hong Kong up to the year 2011; ensure that all new port, airport, associated industrial and residential facilities, transport links and other infrastructure would be incrementally provided according to an integrated and cohesive plan;
form the heart of future major government development programmes to enhance and sustain the stability and prosperity of the territory.
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The magnitude of PADS and its ramifications over many fields the environment, housing, labour deployment, land transportation and geology as well as the more obvious areas of economics, finance, civil engineering and town planning – are such as to constitute a whole field of study in itself; many learned volumes could (and doubtless will) be written on the subject. The PADS studies had to update and collate the findings of many previous surveys, some of them extremely wide-ranging, carried out over the previous fifteen or so years. The study teams comprised members of at least a dozen professional disciplines; and included, significantly, many specialists co-opted from the private sector.
The immediate task before them was to refine and harden two sets of demand forecasts. But never far from their thinking was an awareness of two factors: one, that both government and non-government resources would need to be exploited to the maximum;