Attitudes of Hong Kong residents to cars and public transport: Some policy implications

Hong Kong currently has low levels of car ownership and use due to a combination of good public transport, high population densities and high private transport costs. However, levels are rising, contributing to congestion and environmental problems. A major response by the government is to seek to increase rail's share of public transport journeys from its current level of 33% to 45% by 2016. After reviewing the transport situation in Hong Kong, the paper discusses the appropriateness of these targets as well as questioning whether they are achievable. The results of a questionnaire survey of 595 residents of Hong Kong, designed to elicit people's attitudes to cars and public transport, are analysed. It is concluded that unless the government does more to curb car ownership and use, rail targets will have little chance of being achieved.     

The role of paratransit: some reflections based on the experience of residents’ coach services in Hong Kong

Paratransit refers to urban transport services “somewhere between private passenger transport and conventional public transport in terms of cost and quality of service” [Rimmer (1980), Paratransit: A commentary. Environ. Plan. A 12, 937–944]. Since the 1980s, a new form of paratransit—residents’ coach, which provides exclusive transport services to residents living in private housing estates—has emerged in Hong Kong. What was the background underlying the emergence and subsequent growth of residents’ coach services? Also, what was the role of residents’ coach in the public transport system of Hong Kong? With the completion of more railway extensions, should residents’ coach services be replaced? If so, what are the potential impacts on people’s life? This paper addresses the above research questions through a large-scale questionnaire survey that examined not only people’s modal choice but also their residential choice, socio-economic background and attitudes. The findings suggest that transport policy makers should pay more attention to examine new forms of paratransit and the ways of integrating them into the overall public transport system, both spatially and temporally. It is only through the development of an efficient and multi-modal transport system can the maximum potential of paratransit in filling the transport gap between conventional mass transit and private cars be realized.     

National policy towards cars: the federal republic of Germany

Although much of the early technical development of the automobile occurred in Germany, the spread of car ownership within Germany was relatively slow up to 1933. Besides the general economic situation, this was due to the high costs of purchasing and running a car. With deliberate promotion of automobility by the national‐socialists after 1933, the pace of motorization proceeded more rapidly until the outbreak of World War II. Immediately after the war, motorization was slow to regain momentum but by the middle fifties, after the initial phase of post‐war reconstruction, the rapid build‐up of cars began again and has continued ever since. By 1986, the West German car fleet exceeded 27 million and 80% of motorized passenger kilometres were made by car.

This rapid post‐war growth was made possible by a liberal transport policy which reacted to growing car use by adaptation and provision of the necessary infrastructure. The adverse effects of vehicular traffic on the environment and on the urban quality of life moved policy at the end of the sixties towards stronger support for urban public transport and regulations for noise and exhaust emissions of automobiles. Also, the high toll of death and injuries from road accidents made improvement of road safety another important policy objective. So far, however, measures taken have fallen short of requiring changes in driver behaviour. Although there is widespread awareness of the environmental and accident costs of automobility, there is a reluctance to legislate (or for people voluntarily) to modify driving behaviour for social objectives.

This paper presents, briefly, the main instruments that have been applied in West Germany to achieve car‐related transport policy objectives, including the latest modifications in the tax system intended to foster the use of low‐emission vehicles. Possible future directions of policy towards the car, depending inter alia on changes in government, are also explored.     

Planning and Evaluation of Passenger Ferry Service in Hong Kong

A predominant observation in Hong Kong is the continuous loss in ferry patronage. There are two main reasons for this: poor level-of-service and better competitors. New roads, bridges, and tunnels are serving the buses, and to some extent the railways; whereas the investment in ferry terminals is relatively at a lower level. On the one hand, there is no need to promote the ferries in a free market environment; but on the other hand, the ferries have the best safety record, can only relieve some traffic congestion and need water access that is one of the characteristics of Hong Kong. The goal of this paper is to design a planning approach combined with an evaluation procedure on how to make the best use of the existing water and pier resources in Hong Kong through the provision of commercially viable ferry services. The approach used covers the impact of future developments planning up to 2006 comprising all public transport modes in Hong Kong (heavy rail, metro, bus, and ferry). The planning tool is based on a newly developed multi-objective evaluation method in order to assess the ferry routes with scientific, practical, and simplified analyses for future use. This assessment is applied to the existing ferry routes and candidate routes and can also be carried out on an individual route basis or on a given set of routes. The objective functions set forth analytically in the evaluation method take into account the interests of the three participants: the passengers, the operators and the government. The proposed ferry network design formulation and the suggested new ferry routes will have a positive impact on changing the ferry system’s image in Hong Kong.     

Modelling car ownership in Great Britain

Over the last 50 years there has been a tenfold increase in the number of cars in Great Britain, rising from 2.6 million vehicles in 1951 to 27 million vehicles in 2001. Over the same period there has been a steady reduction in the proportion of households without access to a car and a steady increase in the proportion of households with two or more cars. If such trends continue, it is likely that there will be increased energy consumption, increased problems with traffic congestion and atmospheric pollution, and reductions to the financial viability of public transport. Given the importance of car ownership to transport and land-use planning and its relationship with energy consumption, the environment and health, it is the objective of this research to develop econometric models of household car ownership and apply the models to generate forecasts across Britain to the year 2031. To achieve this objective, the research develops discrete choice models of the household’s decision to own zero, one, two or three or more vehicles as a function of market saturation, licence holding, household income and structure, household employment, company car provision, and purchase and use costs. The models are validated to data from the 2001 Census and are used to develop a range of forecasts taking into account changes to the socio-demographic characteristics of Britain.     

The Gothenburg congestion charges: cost–benefit analysis and distribution effects

This paper performs an ex-post cost–benefit and distribution analysis of the Gothenburg congestion charges introduced in 2013, based on observed effects and an ex-post evaluated transport model. Although Gothenburg is a small city with congestion limited to the highway junctions, the congestion charge scheme is socially beneficial, generating a net surplus of €20 million per year. From a financial perspective, the investment cost was repaid in slightly more than a year and, from a social surplus perspective, is repaid in < 4 years. Still, the sums that are redistributed in Gothenburg are substantially larger than the net benefit. In the distribution analysis we develop an alternative welfare rule, where the utility is translated to money by dividing the utility by the average marginal utility of money, thereby avoiding putting a higher weight on high-income people. The alternative welfare rule shows larger re-distribution effects, because paying charges is more painful for low-income classes due to the higher marginal utility of money. Low-income citizens pay a larger share of their income because all income classes are highly car dependent in Gothenburg and workers in the highest income class have considerably higher access to company cars for private trips. No correlation was found between voting pattern and gains, losses or net gain.

     

Consumers’ attitudes towards electric cars: A case study of Hong Kong

The paper presents the results of a survey carried out in Hong Kong to gauge people’s attitudes towards the environmental aspects of electric cars. The survey shows that people in general recognise the positive environmental benefits of electric cars, but express concerns over their environmental costs, in particular those of battery waste and increased airborne pollutants emitted by power plants when the electricity is produced.     

Means of transport and ontological security: Do cars provide psycho-social benefits to their users?

This paper presents some empirical evidence on the psycho-social benefits people seem to derive from their cars based on in-depth interviews with a sample of car owners and non-car owners in the West of Scotland. We suggest that psycho-social benefits of protection, autonomy and prestige may help to explain people's attachment to cars and also why studies have found consistently that car owners are healthier than non-car owners. In our study cars were seen to provide protection from undesirable people events, and a comfortable cocoon (but not as providing protection against accidents). Cars provided autonomy because car use was seen as being more convenient, reliable and providing access to more destinations than public transport. Cars were seen to confer prestige and other socially desirable attributes such as competence, skill and masculinity. We think that it is important for policy makers to consider how to make public transport more attractive by increasing its potential to provide similar sorts of benefits, and to do so by targetting the different needs of various population groups.     

Deregulating direct flights across the Taiwan Strait: The transformation of Eastern Asian air transport market and network

Over the past decades Hong Kong has been successfully playing a role as a gateway to China. Since 1988, it has also been the most important hub between Taiwan and China. Over 5 million passengers travelled between Taipei and Hong Kong in 1997, making the link the busiest in the world's international air links and contributing one-sixth of the passengers to Hong Kong airport, which before 1997 had the most international passengers in Asia. In the foreseeable future Taiwan will possibly start some direct services to China; the air link between Hong Kong and Taipei will then compete with many links across Taiwan Strait. These changes may cause the transformation of the market and network structure in eastern Asia. Niches of specific airlines and airports will disappear. This paper examines the issues of possible changes in eastern Asian air transport market: the current market environment, the problems for direct flights across Taiwan Strait, the possible links between Taiwan and China, the future role of Hong Kong, and the market structure in the future.     

Ex-post analysis of impacts of the car registration fee in the Czech Republic

Currently, the influence of transportation and its impact on environmental indicators throughout the world are increasing; however, governments of particular countries try to implement new economic instruments with the expectations of changing people’s behaviour or at least environmental parameters of the motor vehicle fleet. The Government of the Czech Republic introduced a new economic instrument, which came into force on 1 January 2009 and was inspired by similar environmental taxes in Member States of the European Union – the car registration fee, which is based on emission parameters of cars. The main target of this fee has been to change the structure of the passenger car fleet in the Czech Republic, particularly to support new registrations of new passenger cars with better environmental characteristics and to decrease the share of new registrations of used passenger cars. This article focuses on an ex-post analysis of impacts of the car registration fee on the structure of the passenger car fleet in the Czech Republic and its environmental characteristics in the first 3 years after the legal mandate of the fee. The case study is based on a correlation analysis and an analysis of statistical data from official sources in the Czech Republic. The impacts of the car registration fee on both the structure of the passenger car fleet in the Czech Republic and the environmental characteristics of new registrations are significant. For the first time since 2004, the number of new registrations of new cars was higher in the period 2009–2011 than the number of new registrations of used cars. Moreover, the share of alternative fuel cars in the passenger car market is increasing and the emissions from private car transport are decreasing.     

Cross-boundary container truck congestion: the case of the Hong Kong-Pearl River Delta region

Ever since the Open Policy in 1979, there has been increasing socio-economic integration between Hong Kong and mainland China. The subsequent rapid export-oriented industrialization in the Hong Kong-Pearl River Delta (HK-PRD) region has given rise to rapidly growing cross-boundary container truck traffic (XBCT). From 1992 to 2003, the volume of XBCT rose from 1.5 to 4.7 million vehicles per annum. Hence, a new customs check-point, the Shenzhen Western Corridor (SWC), was built. With the development of SWC, how would XBCT drivers change their route-cum-customs (RCC) choice? What were their major considerations? How would the route choice among goods vehicle drivers differ from private car drivers? To what extent would the opening of new customs check-points change the RCC choice of goods vehicle drivers and resolve the uneven distribution problem of freight traffic? The current paper seeks to address these questions.     

The Contribution of Benefit-in-Kind Taxation Policy in Britain to the ‘Peak Car’ Phenomenon

Car use per person has historically grown year-on-year in Great Britain since the 1950s, with minor exceptions during fuel crises and times of economic recession. The ‘Peak Car’ hypothesis proposes that this historical trend no longer applies. The British National Travel Survey provides evidence of such an aggregate levelling off in car mileage per person since the mid-1990s, but further analysis shows that this is the result of counter trends netting out: in particular, a reduction in per capita male driving mileage being offset by a corresponding increase in female car driving mileage. A major contributory factor to the decline in male car use has been a sharp reduction in average company car mileage per person. This paper investigates this aspect in more detail. Use of company cars fell sharply in Britain from the 1990s up to the 2008 recession. Over the same period, taxation policy towards company cars became more onerous, with increasing levels of taxation on the benefit-in-kind value of the ownership of a company car and on the provision of free fuel for private use. The paper sets out the changes in taxation policy affecting company cars in the UK, and looks at the associated reductions in company car ownership (including free fuel) and patterns of use. It goes on to look in more detail at which groups of the population have kept company cars and in which parts of the country they have been most used, and how these patterns have changed over time. A preliminary investigation is also made of possible substitution effects between company car and personal car driving and between company car use and rail travel. Clearly, the role of the company car is only one of many factors that are contributing to aggregate changes in levels of car use in Great Britain, alongside demographic changes and a wide range of policy initiatives. But, company car use cannot fall below zero, so the effect of declining year-on-year company car mileage suppressing overall car traffic levels cannot continue indefinitely.     

Transport Demand Management in Turkey: A Genetic Algorithm Approach

Abstract

This article proposes new models for estimating transport demand using a genetic algorithm (GA) approach. Based on population, gross national product and number of vehicles, four forms of the genetic algorithm transport planning (GATP) model are developed – one exponential and the others taking quadratic forms – and applied to Turkey. The best fit models in terms of minimum total average relative errors in the test period are selected for future estimation. Demand management strategies are proposed based on three scenarios: restricting private car use, restricting truck use and the simultaneous management of private car use and goods movement. Results show that the GATP model may be used to estimate transport demand in terms of passenger-kilometers traveled (pass-km), vehicle-kilometers traveled (veh-km) and ton-kilometers completed (ton-km). Results also show that the third scenario – simultaneous restrictions on private car use and goods movement – could reduce total veh-km by about 35% by 2025 in this study of Turkish rural roads.     

Planning and control of paratransit services in Hong Kong

As paratransit services, Hong Kong's taxis and public light buses (PLB) carried some 30% of the 9.7 million daily public transport boardings in Hong Kong in 1988. Most of the vehicles are individually owned, and services are operated as commercially viable concerns. While operators have a high degree of operational flexibility, taxis and PLBs are closely regulated by the Government. The fleet sizes are controlled by licensing. There is a system of zoning for taxis, and operational prohibitions and restrictions for PLBs. Over the years, Hong Kong has developed some practicable means of operational control on taxis and PLBs. It has been 20 years since PLBs were legalized in 1969. The transition experienced by this mode, from no control to regulated operations, signifies a major step forward from the point of view of transport administration. The Government's participation in the planning for PLB services has guided the development of this mode. In this paper, the planning and control mechanisms for Hong Kong's paratransit modes are introduced. Identified deficiencies are also discussed.     

Optimization of tunnel tolls in land use and transport planning

The task of transport planning is to determine cost-effective methods of providing and improving mobility, which can include minimizing traffic congestion. A cost-effective solution to transport problems should consist of a land use pattern, a transport system an a set of road pricing policies that together bring demand and supply into balance in an efficient and equitable way. The conventional approach aimed to produce comprehensive, long-term plans for land use and transport in considerable detail, but tended to ignore the role of road pricing policy, thus ending up with solutions that might not be efficient or economical. This feature of sub-optimal road pricing policy is accentuated by the overall growth in car use, which has generated problems with the efficient use of road space. This paper presents a computer analysis system (or model) which will enable the analysis of coordinated tunnel toll pricing policies by optimising an “objective function” while satisfying the associated and other constraints. The possibility of integrating the optimal road pricing policies in the land use and transport planning are discussed. A case study based on Hong Kong data demonstrates the efficiency of optimizing tolls on two of the three harbour crossing tunnels in Hong Kong.     

Optimal transport strategies for European cities

A new procedure for generating optimal transport strategies has been applied in nine European cities. A public sector objective function which reflects concerns over efficiency, environmental impact, finance and sustainability is specified and a set of policy measures with acceptable ranges on each, identified. Optimal strategies based on combinations of these policy measures which generate the optimal value of the objective function, are identified, and compared between cities. Resulting policy recommendations are presented. The results demonstrate the importance of an integrated approach to transport strategy formulation. They emphasise the role of changes in public transport service levels and of fares, and of charges for car use. By contrast, new infrastructure projects are less frequently justified. In the majority of cities the revenues from car use charges are sufficient to finance other elements in the strategy. However, private sector involvement either in initial financing or in operation may be desirable. Revised objective functions to reflect private sector involvement are specified, and optimal strategies with private sector operation of public transport are also identified. The requirement to meet private sector rates of return for public transport operation typically results in lower frequencies and higher fares; charges for car use then need to be raised to satisfy public policy objectives, but system performance is reduced. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Does a high level of multimodality mean less car use? An exploration of multimodality trends in England

Some existing studies have suggested that a higher level of multimodality—the use of more than one transport mode within a given period of time—may be desirable to achieve societies less dependent on cars. The aim of this study was to investigate the trends in individual multimodality in England. In addition, we explored whether these trends were homogenous, i.e. similar between socio-economic characteristics, and whether changes in multimodality corresponded with changes in car use and the use of other transport modes. Our analyses showed that in contrast to reported trends in existing research, the level of multimodality in England decreased between 1995 and 2015. These trends stratified by income were diverging, which may imply that inequality in transport opportunities may be increasing. In contrast, the trends for age and gender were converging. In addition, we found that the car mode share remained fairly stable and absolute car use decreased since 2004, whilst multimodality decreased. This suggests that there is no necessary relationship between aggregate levels of car use and the average individual level of multimodality. Moreover, our analyses showed that these trends were very similarly independent of which indicator was applied. This indicates that for analysing trends in multimodality, the choice of indicator may not be that important, and indicators that are elementary to calculate and easy to interpret, e.g. number of modes used, highlight trends that are highly consistent with more sophisticated metrics. This paper finishes with a discussion of the implications of these findings.