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Comment by hberg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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