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Friday, October 12, 1973
ENCOURAGING RESPONSE TO TRANSPORT SURVEY
Public response to household interviews being conducted by the
government to get detailed information about transport patterns indicates
that Hong Kong citizens are displaying a higher degree of social con-
sciousness and a greater sense of civic responsibility than communities
in other parts of the world covered by similar surveys in the past.
The response so far has been very encouraging, and the information
which the interviews have yielded will be of great value," a spokesman
for Public Works Department's Highways Office said today.
The series of household interviews, conducted by interviewers
who call at residents' homes, started on September 17 and is now about
20 per cent complete, with about two more months of the programme to run.
About 5,000 households have been visited to date.
A spokesman for Wilbur Smith and Associates, the consulting firm
which has been carrying out the interviews on the government's behalf as
part of the Comprehensive Transport Study, commented: "The rate of
refusals-to-answer up to now stands at only 3.2 per cent. This is
significantly better than the rates which we encountered at comparable stages
of similar surveys in other areas for example, in the United States,
Britain and Australia."
He added that the consultants had high hopes that public participation
would continue at this level during the remainder of the surveys.
"In particular, we hope for a similar co-operative response
in our roadside interviews, which will start next week. Information from
these interviews can play a vital part in rounding out our picture of transport
patterns."
/Motorists