Hong Kong Government Hypes White Elephant

It cost Hong Kong HK$84.4 billion to build this high-speed rail station

When I visited the Hong Kong West Kowloon Railway Station last weekend, it looked quite busy with a number of passengers wandering around, buying tickets, or checking in.

But according to figures from the MTR Corporation, the numbers are down for the second month in a row since it opened.

About 1.5 million passengers per month used the high speed rail between September 23 and November 22. That means the average daily passenger number was around 50,000, which is 38 percent less than MTR's estimate of 80,000.

It cost taxpayers HK$84.4 billion to build the much-hyped project, and before the opening, the government boasted the high-speed railway would be profitable from day one.

There are 38 percent fewer passengers coming through

Uh huh.

Today the MTR Corp claimed it would take some time for people to get used to the service, and the company was continually working to upgrade services.

"The MTR Corp has been using various sales strategies to reach out to different customer groups... including by offering more promotion and partnering with industry players to expand sales channels," the firm said.

Before the high speed railway opened on September 23, Hong Kong transport minister Frank Chan Fan was "pretty confident" the service would be profitable from the outset, saying it would not incur losses, based on official projections for passengers and "competitive" ticket prices.

He probably said that in the hopes of getting consumer confident about the service. It has been revealed the government is contractually bound to step in and absorb 70 percent of financial losses if the difference between projected and actual passenger numbers is more than 15 percent.

We taxpayers have to pay for the government's inability to more accurately forecast how many people are going to use the service? Wouldn't it be better to underestimate than over estimate?

Many Hong Kong people have complained about how inconvenient the routes are -- as the stations in the mainland are not located in central business district areas and instead near suburbs; they would rather fly or take the slower trains to get to the city centre.

The clean-up following Typhoon Mangkhut continues

There seems to be a pattern here -- when it comes to projecting the Hong Kong government's revenues, the finance minister is almost always way off the mark when delivering his budget. How can they get this wrong by several hundreds of millions of dollars?

And then the government doesn't prepare with how to deal with the aftermath of Super Typhoon Mangkhut. The government was great in insisting everyone stay at home and be prepared before the super typhoon came, but afterwards there is a lot of criticism for insufficient transport links for people to get to work, and the mess is still being cleaned up.

Now we have a giant infrastructure project that cost tens of billions of dollars, and it's not reaching the passenger numbers the government had in mind -- even expecting the high-speed rail to pay for itself on the first day of service!

Tall order...

Hong Kong officials are completely clueless about what is really happening in the city. They really need to get out of their ivory towers and experience what life is like for ordinary people. These civil servants seem completely out of touch with reality.

Scary, isn't it?