Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcr0 | Hacker News Reader

I live in Hong Kong, where 95% of the population uses public transport daily, and has a very low car ownership rate. Reasons include $7.4 petrol (gal), vehicle registration tax that can exceed 100%, and expensive parking ($400 a month for a single car, and that's just at home)

Private car owners are typically the wealthy and those who live in villages (lower housing and parking costs).

That's probably the future of cities and car ownership imo

The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers.

View on HN

I was in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago.

You and your numerous fellow residents are fortunate enough to live in a city that has quite possibly the best designed and most ubiquitous public transit system I have ever encountered as well as a city geography where it is economically viable to service virtually everyone.

The vast majority of the world's cities are not quite so lucky. This is especially for cities in the American Midwest. I live in one - Detroit. It would be nigh on impossible to function without a car in this city.

Its not luck

> The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers.

Couldn't agree more. Situation is very similar in Tokyo. Almost from anywhere in the city, one can walk to a train station within 15 min; and trains come every 5-10 min if not more often. I was very surprised when I had to wait for 1 hour for CalTrain to go from airport to Palo Alto.

To be fair, Hong Kong is an extremely dense city, built in a location with very little developable land.

The density is both the reason for the high cost of car ownership as well as the efficiency of its public transportation system.

And the density has other impacts on life as well, of course. The density we talk about looks like this in some places: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/01/12/article-2085752-0F...

(Just googled a random picture, but you get the idea; Hong Kong density is rather extreme).

I tried to imagine what kind of transport infrastructure can be developed to accommodate possession of at least 2 cars per household in such places. So I realized that the only thing keeping the current cities developing and looking like some kinky SciFi version of them is ...regulation!

Of course, packing people into these Hong Kong apartments (dozens of stories of flats upon each other, 3 people living in a 5 square meter unit) is not exactly considered "good quality life" by most of us. Though it is better than the life these people had before.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/wealthy-hong-kong-poor...

Your linked article says around 100k people live in those cramped quarters. Fair enough, that's roughly 1.3% of the population (7,234,800 as of 2014 estimate).

In other words, there's plenty of people living in what you and me would classify as normal apartments. Albeit perhaps not incredibly spacious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com