My Visit to Hong Kong: Part 2
December 19th, 2008, by Jeremy Krygsman
Buses in Hong Kong
Extremely dense, mixed use
city blocks
Older style tenements
Inside of a highway cloverleaf
A streetcar with an elevated
highway in the background
Hong Kong is the ultimate urban machine. Each part is carefully placed and tuned so that the entire system can run at high speed, 24/7, it has to be! The lights in this city are never out; people work early in the morning until late into the evening, while shopping areas are packed with people during the midday and evening hours, and entertainment districts keep the late night and early morning hours busy.
Every inch of this city is used up as well, and almost always with more than one floor. There are some areas downtown where you feel like you’re in one of those sci-fi cities of the future, the ones where neighborhoods are classified in vertical levels. There are good and bad things about a city this dense, as well as some important lessons to learn about it.
Mass Transit and Road Networks :: If the roads are the arteries of Hong Kong, the busses are its blood cells
- City bus service is excellent, with a number of bus companies running a range of vehicles, from huge double deck buses to smaller van sized vehicles. A single double decker bus can fit a huge number of people inside, and they usually come at most every ten minutes!
- Most major buildings have large bus terminals in the basement.
- Hong Kong subways are clean, frequent, and very well designed. The system has an excellent interlining system, so when you get off at a station to transfer to another line, you usually just have to walk across the platform to get on the train to where you want to go.
- Subways are the gateway to a true world-class city!
- Roads are very well designed and generally move smoothly. Flyovers and elevated highways are a common and necessary part of the transportation infrastructure.
- Toronto could learn from the use of space below elevated highways in Hong Kong — most of them stand elegantly on a wide central pier, and have sculptural dividers or even gas stations below them.
One of the biggest positives about a dense city like Hong Kong is the constant availability of mass transit. However, density comes with costs; such as a lack of historic building stock, and a level of overcrowding that can become tiresome for a North American.
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