Page 97 of 115
178
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
I turn then to what is in effect the second part of my motion namely, giving consideration to further steps that can be taken to minimise inconvenience in the matter of collection of parking fees and general organization of the car park. Except for one point which I will mention shortly the arrangements in respect to driving in and out of the car park are good, but there does seem to be justifiable criticism over the manner of collection of parking fees. As a person drives in there are a couple of attendants available to give him a ticket but on his return to take his car away he has to trail down to a sort of shroff's office called the attendant's room in order to pay his fees and then trail back again to his car and to give up the ticket that he originally received. At rush hours there is usually a queue lining up outside the shroff's office and the inconvenience is considerable. I would suggest for the Select Committee's consideration that it ought to be possible for the driver of the car to obtain a ticket from a time punching machine at the entrance on arrival. In the absence of the machine then I would suggest the nearest equivalent by hand. At the exit point there might be placed one or more attendants with tickets similar to those issued by conductors on buses and trams say in denominations of 50 and upwards. The driver would then surrender his time punched card, pay the money and receive in exchange the appropriate ticket without the necessity of any walking whatsoever.
There are also some complaints being made as regards the actual parking spaces. Whilst it is obviously important to fill up the various stories from the ground upwards, there does not seem to be any particular reason why a car should be directed to any particular spot on the one floor. The attendants however like to fill the floor up in a fairly uniform manner so that the car owner often has a fair distance to walk back rather than parking it in a spot of greater convenience to himself. This is doubly so whilst we still have the system of paying at the shroff's office, because obviously car owners desire to park their cars as near as possible to the office. I think perhaps consideration might be given to permitting the drivers to be free to park wherever they wish once they have been directed to the appropriate storey.
One of the greatest grounds of complaint is in respect to the provision that persons are not permitted to enter the car park for the purpose of cleaning cars. As I said at the beginning, once the two car parks are in use they will contain a very large proportion of the total number of cars parked on an average day in the central district and if car cleaners are not to be allowed in, this will undoubtedly put out of business a number, if not all, of the present existing car cleaning firms. These firms have been established for a number of years now and are mainly, I think, encouraged by such organizations as the Automobile Association or particular large private firms. Apart from the fact that we do not desire, particularly at these times, to put people out of business, I am sure that the lack of car cleaning facilities is a very great inconvenience to the car owners. Car cleaners provide a very good cleaning service at very reasonable rates and I am sure that we owe the clean looking state of our Hong Kong cars very largely to these regular organizations with their buckets, cloths and feather dusters. I quite agree that we must exercise proper control and supervision and we cannot admit the type of person that is to be found for instance around the vehicular ferry wharves who comes up willie nilly, gives the car a few flips with a duster, and then expects a tip. I feel however that we should not object to entry by regular and recognized employees of cleaning firms. In point of fact on occasions one can see the areas underneath and around cars standing in the car park are all wet and the natural inference to be drawn is that the vehicle has been cleaned. Presumably it has been cleaned by the owner himself, so that it cannot be argued that there is any objection to the actual cleaning of cars in the car park.
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
179
Since I presume cars are normally left locked up in the park, and in any event I hope that we are not incurring any liability in respect to theft and the like, I find it difficult to see why we should object to the continuance in our car parks of the cleaning services that have up to date been rendered to the cars parked in the open car parks of the central reclamation and other parts of the central district. I am in fact informed by several would-be users of our car park that the only reason why they do not use the park is because they cannot engage the services of a car cleaner inside. Akin to this is the further service that most of these car cleaning firms render namely, that of taking over the car at the entrance to the reclamation and delivering it back to the owner at an agreed time and place later in the day. I gather that this service has also been meeting with difficulties in respect to our own car park. I see no objection to our insisting that only employees of regular firms in uniform should be admitted but with that restriction let
Page 97 of 113