The traffic condition in Hung Hom is the topic on this blog. Traffic congestion in Hung Hom, especially for the road to Cross Harbour Tunnel, has been a very serious problem affecting a lot of people of Hong Kong living in Kowloon. In the working day morning, the traffic jam is so problematic that it takes passengers more than an hour from Hung Hom to Sheung Wan while the expected transportation time is just around half an hour. The situation worsens after 6 pm at which most workers plan to go home. In the worst case, the traffic jam takes people 2 hours home, which is completely unacceptable. More importantly, the problem will not be alleviated with more citizens planning to take driver licenses and purchase their personal vehicles, so policies need to be implemented as soon as possible to tackle the traffic jam problem. The following suggests some possible measures aiming at alleviating the problem.
A short-term measure includes promoting alternative working hours could be a way to alleviate the road demand during the busy time/hours. The public of Hong Kong shares the same feeling that traffic jams happen in periods between 8-9 am and 6-7 pm which is the time for most people to go to work and home. In other periods, the vehicle motion is relatively smooth and the roads are affordable to the current vehicles demand, which means one of the effective solutions is to minimise the number of vehicles during busy hours. To achieve this, encouraging alternative working hours is what the government could do to alleviate the problem. The government could take the lead to encourage departments to plan alternative working time so as to decrease the number of private vehicles during busy hours and alleviate the demand for road use. This measures could also indicate how determined the government hopes to solve the problem and demonstrate to companies what they could to support the policies that benefit all people of Hong Kong using roads. Some possible alternative working hour plans include working from 7am or 11am so the busy hours could be avoided and workers need less time for transportation which means more leisure time they could enjoy.
In addition to alternative working hours, road building and expansion will be regarded as a long-term improvement method. Even if encouraging alternative working time could be really helpful for the current situation, a more effective measure is also needed to fulfill the vehicles demand in the future. Building road is the one to do so that the road space is expanded and more car could be filled on it at the same time. However, there is a big problem that should not be overlooked, which is the capacity of tunnels. Given that more roads are built and all vehicles move smoothly, they will eventually be stuck at the entrance of the Cross Habour Tunnel when it already reaches full capacity. Hence, road and tunnel expansion should be done in a pair in order to ensure the traffic jam problem can effectively be solved. The process takes years for the whole procedure including planning, construction, exploration, etc, so the short-term measure should be considered during the construction.
The article briefly introducing some suggestions towards the current traffic jam problem aims at providing some insight for people to think more about where Hong Kong should start to plan the solution and how the stakeholders of Hong Kong could participate in alleviating the problem.
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